> joand315 wrote:
>>Should we just leave Iraq and let it degenerate into a civil war? Won't
>>many more innocent people be killed as a result?
>>
>>We turned Iraq into a failed state, there are steps we can take to
>>restore its functionality, but none of those include making it a
>>democracy. That would take another 30 or 40 years, I would think.
>>-joan
> This thread wandered off in some strange directions, and as I reread the
> posts today I thought it would be worthwhile to give some of the
> statements in it a different context.
>
> The White Man's Burden
> By Rudyard Kipling
>
> Take up the White Man's burden--
> Send forth the best ye breed--
> Go, bind your sons to exile
> To serve your captives' need;
> To wait, in heavy harness,
> On fluttered folk and wild--
> Your new-caught sullen peoples,
> Half devil and half child.
>
> Carrol
ok. Rudyard Kipling is just gross.
Iraq is full of people that are trained and capable and eager to rebuild what we have destroyed. The power vacuum that we have left in place of the former government, however, means those people have no mechanism by which to set about rebuilding. After reading the blog from Riverbend, I see that we in the US have co-opted the process so completely that we have American companies reinventing a thousand wheels. Wheels the Iraqis already know how to build and can use expertly. I just think we have broken things so badly that Iraq can only become a viable state again after a period of non-democratic government, run by Iraqis, of course.
I hope you don't think I was trumpeting Kipling's ode to imperialism. My point was that it takes democracy a while to evolve. You can't just snap your fingers and have a democratic nation. In country after country we have held elections first, only to have those states fail, because we did not ensure that those countries had sufficient institutional infrastructure to function. I think it takes a long time for that infrastructure to develop. The economy has to be stable and self-sustaining, there must be the rule of law, the people have to have a vested interest in the power structure, or the power structure has to be reasonably responsive to a sufficient number of the people to be viable, etc. I just hope they don't have to fight a civil war to figure out how to get from here to there.
-joan