Steve P vs. Chris H

[Dennis Perrin]

> But the only people around right now who are going after Saddam are
> the Bush gang, whether or not he buys into their rhetoric. And Bush
> doesn't want a democratic Iraq - he wants to make Gen Tommy Franks
> its proconsul. A democratic Iraq might be a very inconvenient thing,
> voting to ally with Iran, or choosing to invest oil revenues in Iraqi
> development rather than in U.S. Treasury bonds.
>
> So Hitch is signing up with the same national security state that
> supported Saddam when he was hanging Communists and gassing Iranians,
> the same one that has for decades preferred Islamic reactionaries to
> secular leftists, the same one that funded the embryonic Al Qaeda.
> He's vocal about how icky Ramsey Clark is, but I hear very little
> about his new allies, Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld. He professes himself an
> anti-Zionist, but he's effectively allied himself with the most
> rabidly Zionist forces in U.S. politics. He can talk all he wants
> about his criticisms of Bush & Co., but he's effectively their boy
> right now - and broadly perceived as such.
>
> As Orwell might say, Tommy Franks is a liberator.
>
> Doug

I hear you. The main reason I oppose this war has to do with what you've
laid out: What would a post-Saddam Iraq look like? If this were a global
effort to oust a potentially dangerous and destabilizing dictator and
replace him with a multiethnic democracy, who here wouldn't sign on? (Well,
I have some guesses . . .) But given the region and realpolitick, I cannot
see anything but another Sunni regime keeping the Kurds and Shias in check,
only this one would be beholden to Washington, much more so than Saddam ever
was, and its use of force would be limited.

Then there's the oil angle, and I highly doubt that the Bush/Cheney Co. is
interested in the democratic allocation of crude.

The only good thing one can say about US intervention in Iraq right now is
the protection of the Kurds, who are, as we've seen, blossoming in a way
unimaginable if Saddam were left alone. And that's really the question for
the "antiwar" crowd: What is your solution? If you say US out of Iraq and
End the Sanctions, then what becomes of the Kurds? And what about Saddam's
quest for the bomb? Would you feel safer with a nuclear Iraq? Isn't it bad
enough that Pakistan is armed?

So, we can jeer Bush till our throats give out, and it feels good, I know.
But this situation, in addition to the al-Qaeda factor, is a little more
complicated than just "No Blood for Oil!"

DP