“When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.” Edumnd Burke
i do not belive in the US being the worlds police force.....we simply did not have a dog in the fight.....come on going to war for kuwait.....
i have long advocted closing all foriegn military bases and cutting off all forigen aid.....let someone else take care of things for awahile.....i feel like the guy that goes out with his friends week after week, always picks up the check and all everyone does is bitch about the food, or the beer, or the women....
"I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn't, than live my life as if there isn't and die to find out there is."
~Albert Camus
Simple answer ... going into Iraq and doing the job the right way would offend the hell out of the PC and the liberal coalition of world opinion.
The religious sects who are causing all the trouble now were already isolated, and should have been kept that way for the Iraqi government to deal with at a later time when it was on its own feet.
The Iraqi Army should have been rounded up and put in detention and weeded through one at a time.
Iraq's borders should have been sealed.
Since all of the above would cause the liberal wailing and gnashing of teeth, the factional infighting was inevitable. Saddam keeping the region off balance by having isolated himself fromt he rest of the Arab World was preferable to that.
“When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.” Edumnd Burke
Sounds like a plan, but you probably would have needed more troops. Dunno how you would have sealed a porous border. Like the idea of isolating the extremists like Sadr etc. However, I still think betrayal and kinship is so endemic in arab society that it might have been a bridge too far in getting those who generally hate each other to work together...I blame the Brits for not taking religious and ethnic considerations into account when partitioning the ME back in the day...
"I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn't, than live my life as if there isn't and die to find out there is."
~Albert Camus