Please ask Hitchens - since he's in Bush's camp, I assume he knows all about whatever Bush & Co. have planned - if he thinks that U.S. protectorate he's rooting for will allow the Kurds an independent state as they desire, thus driving Turkey (where all those air bases are) into a frenzy over the possible future seizure of the Kurdish sector of Turkey into a Greater Kurdistan, or instead will continue to force the Kurds against their will to be part of and dominated by non-Kurds in a single Iraqi state. Also ask him if he supports roping the Shiites in the South of Iraq into that unified Iraqi state, and if so, does he support giving them the franchise to vote? Those Shiites make up a majority in Iraq, so if we set up Iraq as one democratic state, they'd control the whole country. Ask him if he and the Bush Administration support or oppose the dismemberment of Iraq into three states.
Of course the main purposes of the proposed war are Western security against weapons-of-mass-destruction falling into Terrorist hands and freeing the Iraqi population from oppression, but then there's also those oil fields. I vaguely remember reading that Iran, Iraq, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia all nationalized their oil fields, do any of you who know more about the region know if that's right? Does Hitchens favor or disfavor the nationalization of the Iraqi oil fields by the new post-Saddam state or states, or should they be sold off at fire sale prices, as the Soviet industries were, to overseas investors?
>From the "me-first" camp, also ask him whether he thinks bombing and
invasion of Iraq would increase or decrease the likelihood of more Al
Qaida attacks against the U.S. and Western Europe. Supposing the answer
is "more," while it might perhaps be an excellent thing for the
surviving Iraqis after we bomb Saddam out of power, how many more 9-11s
does he suggest we in the West should be willing to endure as a
consequence of our selfless pro-Iraqi humanitarianism?
(A few times I've posted to this list, people failed to read what I think is obviously sarcastic as such, and then I get these "fuck you" emails offlist, which hurt my feelings, so please note the words "selfless" and "humanitarianism" in that last paragraph are not to be taken at face value. TIA.)
Yours WDK - WKiernan at concentric.net