Re: OT:Why Graham Thinks US is Hated


"soundhaspriority" <nowhere@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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"ScottW" <ScottW48@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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[snip]>
BTW, I've done a bit of reading and..always need to do more...
but as I go through history with the vision of hinsight and look
at the options availabe, I'm often hard pressed to find
an option that will yield obviously better results, even in
hindsight.

I had a discussion in this forum with Paul Packer, in which I think
we both concluded that while the invasion itself was justified by
the threat Saddam posed on a geopolitical scale, everything that
followed was badly bungled. It appears that the plan for the "new
Iraq" was composed by a Republican brain trust that simply had
unrealistic expectations for the evolution of a society hundreds of
years behind the West. The Saudis gave some advice, that was
ironically the same given by Russia regarding Afghanistan: buy the
place. Buy your enemies; make them "friends" according to their own
standards.

and yet that seems shortsighted as well if the real goal is truly
representative democracy. Sure...we could have bought
Saddam's overthrow...but would his successors have
been an improvement.

I think, while perhaps some professional elements of the army
may have been retained for security, the Baathists in the
beauracracy had to go.

Instead, anyone who had any previous connection with the governing
infrastructure was disallowed, literally daring them to form an
insurgency. Not unexpected, considering the options we gave them.

No, and working throuht it will take some time but there are signs of
progress.

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/world/archives/2006/08/30/2003325492




Iraq could have ended up as an inwardly focused, slightly
democratic, slightly pluralistic country in which change for the
better would come when the zeitgeist of that country called for it.

or remained an oppressive dictatorship for another 30 years.


This is the danger of ideologically motivated thinking; the American
architects of the new Iraq were listening to themselves, instead of
people who knew the people of Iraq.

Those people whose advice you so readily accept do not want
a successful democratic Iraq.


The book I recommended to you is was written by a Russian journalist
very much in the tradition of our "New Journalism" , ie., Tom Wolfe
and Hunter S. Thomson.

I saw Hunter S. Thompson when I was in college.
He thought anyone who admired him was a fool.
After listening to him for an hour.. I had to agree.

It is a brilliant work of immersive literature, from which I learned
that the questions the Russians ask, to this day, are amusingly
similar to our own. The first one is, "How did we (Russians) get
into Afghanistan in the first place?" In self reply, all sorts of
theories are floated.

The other thing I learned is that while we think of the Russian Army
as a brutal occupier, the subjugation of Afghanistan was actually
carried out with great sophistication. The Russians know every trick
in the book: persuasion, co-opting, consideration. friendship, aid,
propaganda, and brutality, all served up with the skill of an
apparatus that had been practicing subversion for fifty years. And
it didn't help them! They still got kicked out, which is an ominous
portent for our own efforts. When the Americans went into
Afghanistan after 9/11, they said to us, "Nobody can conquer
Afghanistan, but the richest nation in the world could buy it."

Perhaps we are...in the drug trade.

ScottW


.

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