Iran's influence on the Iraqi election

This is a very real possibility - but don't make the mistake of assuming that the US will feel bound by any promise that it has made.

How deplorable that foreigners are meddling in the internal affairs of Iraq.

danmand said:

How deplorable that foreigners are meddling in the internal affairs of Iraq.

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We in the USA just HATE when that happens.......

CH812 said:

Wouldnt it be ironic for the US if the Iraqi people elect a shiya majority government similar to the mullah's in Iran? The US would have no choice but to support this new government because they have been promising the world a democratic Iraq.

Right now CIA sources are saying over 1 million foreigners have come into Iraq trying to influence the upcomming election with the majority of these people coming from Iran. And with the large shiya population in Iraq its very well possible they will be the ones in power after the January 20th election.

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The US plans for a secular decocracy in Iraq are destined to fail. They'll never unite that divided country and the longer they stay, the worse it will get. This according to Gen. William E. Odom, a retired US general who once headed the National Security Agency.

"...It was hard to disagree with Odom's description of Mr. Bush's vision of reordering the Middle East by building a democracy in Iraq as a pipedream. His prescription: Remove U.S. forces "from that shattered country as rapidly as possible." Odom says bluntly, "we have failed," and "the issue is how high a price we're going to pay - less, by getting out sooner, or more, by getting out later."

At best, Iraq will emerge from the current geopolitical earthquake as "a highly illiberal democracy, inspired by Islamic culture, extremely hostile to the West and probably quite willing to fund terrorist organizations," Odom explained. If that wasn't enough to erode support for the war, Odom added, "The ability of Islamist militants to use Iraq as a beachhead for attacks against American interests elsewhere may increase."

Odom, who heads the pro-Republican Hudson Institute, also sees the sum total of what the U.S. occupation of Iraq has achieved is "the radicalization of Saudi Arabia and probably Egypt, too. And the longer we stay in Iraq, the more isolated America will become."....."

http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20040429-113745-2828r

I agree with you slowpoke and the statement posted.
Taking out Saddam is one thing, trying to build a "western style democracy" in Iraq is a pipe dream.

Yep. The US has got to get out AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.

Makes you seriously wonder where they got their plans to reinvent Iraq after they'd toppled Saddam. My guess is they had visions of sugarplums dancing in their heads and very little else. It took a monster like Saddam, with his secret police and terror apparatus, to hold that divided country together - yet the US seems to have expected secular democracy to occur almost automatically once the Iraqis were liberated. Didn't anyone ever tell them about Pandora?

IMHO the expectations were, that people would welcome their liberation from a tyrann.
The situation would be a whole lot better today, if there would be an honest support from the population.
While it is hard to predict these things upfront (things are always easier in retrospect) sooner or later someone needs to come to the realization, that the original assumptions were wrong.

We might not be able to create a country to our liking, but we have removed Saddam. Even that in retrospect is a questionable success.

CH812 said:

Yes... Getting rid of Saddam was a good thing BUT in getting rid of him the US has created god knows how many Bin Laden's.

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I don't believe that statement. The thread was there before it was just hidden.

langeweile said:

I don't believe that statement. The thread was there before it was just hidden.

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Religious fundamentalism was never allowed to flourish under Saddam but it is difficult to know how much of it was lurking beneath the surface and how much has been created anew by the opportunists and agitators who have descended like locusts on that ravaged country.

If the post invasion period had been better planned and executed, I think they might have gotten the support of enough moderate Iraqis to form the basis for a secular democratic transition. But it has been an unmitigated disaster for the long suffering Iraqi people. The US had already destroyed much of the non military infrastructure in their first attack, the one presided over by Dubya's daddy. So in order to capture the hearts and minds of the people, the US would have had to have realistic post invasion plans to protect the hospitals and government institutions from looting, while they quickly restored power, clean running water, and police services etc.

Sadly, the US had no such plans, except to protect the oil ministry so the Iraqis have continued to suffer. Remember, they've had over 10 years of crippling sanctions and shortages which also destroyed their economy, so the US would have had to show a post invasion improvement to be seen as liberators. But the situation has gotten out of control and the extremists are now well entrenched so it is all over. The devil was in the details.

If all these terrorists were there, how come the attacks aren't declining while they're being killed?

The invasion has created MASSIVE new waves of recruits for the Islamists.

Of course Saddam had terrorists in his country before the invasion. So? The fact remains he did NOT support the Islamists responsible for 9/11, and therefore the invasion was not a backlash against terrorist activity.
Next.
(BTW, what's his "long history of supporting Arab Nationalists"?)

(BTW, what's his "long history of supporting Arab Nationalists"?)

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A link to a good paper on Arab Nationalism (or more aptly the myth of) that covers Saddam’s sketchy and brief role in the movement. BTW Arab ‘Nationalism’ encompasses potentially about 200 million Arabs in 22 states, a sub-set of the 1.4 billion Muslims that the Christian Evangelicals (God bless them ) are now picking a fight with.

click The rise and fall of Arab nationalism

Here’s an excerpt that pertains:

.....And what of the remaining Arab nationalists? After 1967, their numbers and influence steadily dwindled, except among intellectuals. Many intellectuals actually did live a pan-Arab reality. They wrote in Arabic for an audience that stretched "from the Ocean to the Gulf," and published in pan-Arab journals that circulated just as widely. They jetted from capital to capital for conferences on the state of the Arabs. They had one foot (and sometimes both) in the West, where the freest Arabic press and publishing houses did their business. In this rarified atmosphere, the myths of Arab nationalism could still be sustained. For the most part, these intellectuals did not regard the defeat of 1967 as a failure of their idea, but rather as a failure of its implementation by others, who were criticized for not being sufficiently radical or sufficiently ruthless. Much of the Arab nationalist "self-criticism" after 1967 pushed even further toward advocacy of violent change. But intellectuals lacked an Arab Bismarck who would revive an idea whose time had come and nearly gone. Nasser had faltered, and in 1970 he died. The Ba'th in Syria, after more twists and turns, came to rest in 1970 under Hafiz al-Asad, a master of realpolitik who put Syria above all. For lack of better alternatives, Arab nationalists fixed their hopes first on the Palestinians, and finally on Saddam Hussein.

In 1990, Saddam's Iraq invaded Kuwait, declaring it a province of Iraq. Possession of Kuwait would have filled the Iraqi treasury in perpetuity (a treasury that held a cash reserve of $30 billion back in 1980 but groaned under a debt of more than $100 billion a decade later). Significantly, Iraq did not formally justify its invasion as an act of Arab nationalist unification. Iraq claimed that Kuwait belonged properly to the state of Iraq, and that the annexation asserted an Iraqi legal right, not an Arab moral claim. But Arab nationalists seized upon Saddam as though he were a reincarnation of Nasser, and an improvement at that, for being far more reckless and ruthless. While he lacked Nasser's charm, he had oil, missiles, nerve agents, and nuclear potential — power, he hinted, that would be put at the service of all the Arabs. He would be their sword, much like the four giant swords he had cast for his victory arches in Baghdad, dedicated at a ceremony in 1989 during which he paraded upon a white horse

what would you think would happend when c avg and junky becomes a world strogest leader.
Letme simplify a f***up.

1st a dum person only can get lucky

2nd junky don't listen to anyone. If they did they would not be Juky.

3rd Wehn Junky gets power he tries to show off.

Now US $ and life will pay for appointed and elected fool
From US

SMITHJONES789 said:

what would you think would happend when c avg and junky becomes a world strogest leader.
Letme simplify a f***up.

1st a dum person only can get lucky

2nd junky don't listen to anyone. If they did they would not be Juky.

3rd Wehn Junky gets power he tries to show off.

Now US $ and life will pay for appointed and elected fool
From US

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Ah, now I understand, this post really clears it up for me.

LOL

OTB

bbking said:

.... and I was hoping you would translate it for me. Oh well I will have to see if Ranger will grace us with a translation - I'm not a 100% sure but I suspect SmithJones is part of Rangers crowd.


bbk

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Maybe it is his mom......LOL

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/74DCC874-441A-41DC-9598-14D149909BFD.htm

a snip from the article..

Mosul election staff quit en masse


Friday 31 December 2004, 15:19 Makka Time, 12:19 GMT

The entire staff of Iraq's Independent Electoral Commission in the northern city of Mosul, amounting to about 700 emplo-yees, have resigned amid growing violence in the country.

Staff members said on Thursday their resignation followed threats they received in the past few days. The withdrawal of the Iraqi Islamic Party from the election also figured in their decision, Aljazeera has learned.

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Someone already did (The Pentagon?). When the Iraqi war started, do you recall when they put up their English site? They had trouble with their IP propagation, their servers where attacked it seems to go on for months. I think it just made people like myself, want to know more...finally it stopped and the site normalised.