> I doubt very much that the left can do anything to stop this invasion,
> but perhaps they can prevent Saddam being replaced by another
> dictator and the Kurds being screwed again.
But how? One of the potential successors named in a piece fwd'd by Doug, General Nizar Al-Khazraji, who conducted the massacre at Halabja. Another, Brigadier-General Najib al-Salihi, was a commander of the Republic Guard when it crushed the '91 uprising, and another in '95. However, I don't know what to make of Ahmad Chalabi. Of course, one individual does not make a nation, but two of these three guys would appear happy with Saddam's regime minus Saddam.
Some of us oppose the war not because we're 'soft' on Saddam and his brutality, but because the previous US response to a major uprising against: it tacitly supported crushing it. The US permitted helicopter gunships to pass through the 'no-fly' zones and to allowed the Republican Guard to move past US forces unmolested, which proceed to crush the resistance. As it was said under a previous Bush, the ideal government in Iraq from Washington's perspective would be Saddam's regime without Saddam. What is the basis for supporters of the war believing this has changed?
The piece on Saddam's successors fwd'd opened with this:
> Saddam, of course, has never had a problem with making enemies.
> Indeed, the breadth of the Iraqi opposition -- from Islamic
> fundamentalists and communists to monarchists and
> free-marketeers -- demonstrates his ability in this respect.
> Seemingly every week a new group springs up and issues an
> identikit statement to the international media. Recently one
> organisation, which nobody seems to have heard of except its own
> members, even took over the Iraqi embassy in Germany to prove
> that it existed.
>
> There are, however, some basic patterns to the cacophony of
> proclamations from new movements, councils and parties that
> purport to represent the voice of the authentic Iraqi individual.
>
> First, there are the national bodies that were created inside Iraq
> before 1990, when the bond that had formed between Iraq and the
> US was shattered by the invasion of Kuwait. These are groups like
> the Iraqi Communist Party, the largest group in Iraq from the 1950s
> through to the 1970s, and al-Daawa al-Islamiyya (the Islamic Call),
> which engineered the biggest demonstrations against the Iraqi
> regime in the 1970s and had close ties with Ayatollah Khomeini's
> Islamic revolutionaries in neighbouring Iran.
>
> With extensive experience of organisation and the political process
> inside Iraq, many of these groups retain some level of support -- or
> at least respect -- among many of the Iraqi people. They have three
> things in common: they are intensely persecuted by the Iraqi regime,
> they are wholly unpalatable to the West, and they strongly oppose a
> US invasion on the grounds of the suffering this will cause the Iraqi
> people.
-- Shane
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