Nate Responds!

Nate returns from hiding to poke holes in the seemingly irrefutable logic here at Public Musings. Nate's criticism of Blair and Bush is that they err on the side of ideology rather than pragmatism, which has contributed to the continuing problems in that country. He is surely correct to some degree. Right now I'm almost finished with the Assassin's Gate, a Christmas present and a must read for those with a curiousity about Iraq. It starts by following the policy battles in Washington, about the curious group everyone loves to hate known as the neoconservatives and how their arguments were able to win the day after 9/11 and how they became fascinated with Iraq. The book goes into chapters about Iraqi exiles and their plans, American troops on the ground and their experiences, Kurdish, Sunni and Shia men and women in Iraq and their perspectives. Now I'm in the Chapter appropriately entitled Civil War?

The book is a monster. Packard goes in with a ferocity trying to find truth and make sense of a situation that for all intents and purposes is unknowable and almost incapable of understanding. The people of Iraq are curious creatures and one feels equal parts sympathy and frustration with their deliberations, hopes, and suspicions.

But one thing remains clear to me in reading this book, a single man like Saddam can ruin and psychologically batter an entire generation of 20 million plus people in the relatively short historical time frame of 30 years. His policies were all geared towards subjugating the majority of the population underneath a terror government which benefited no one - not even the Sunnis in power. He had an odd layered system, a pyramid scheme of power in which no one benefited and everyone lived in fear. His sons were monsters of their own system. It was sick.

Knowing this helps explain the difficulties today. The ethnic fighting makes more sense when you know that Saddam had a policy "Arabizing" Kurdish areas by moving Arabs into Kirkuk and taking land and space away from the Kurds, who now want it back.

I know this: If you have credit card debt, you can keep paying off the minimum and get by. But one day, you're going to have to pay the whole thing at a massive interest rate. Iraq had gotten to a point where the balance was so huge, it was paying more interest than the principal. One day, someone was going to need to pay this debt - maybe it wasn't us in 2003, but some day someone was going to have to deal with Iraq and it was never going to be pretty. Maybe we weren't suited to. In fact, surely we weren't...and aren't suited to. But then again, who else is there?