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Date Posted: Wed, February 09 2005, 17:41:39
Author: Larry Lusk
Author Host/IP: 66.214.61.187
Subject: Re: Thoughts on the Iraqi election.
In reply to: Wayne 's message, "Re: Thoughts on the Iraqi election." on Wed, February 09 2005, 7:38:00

Wayne, in a round about way you have touched on something I glossed over in my thoughts about the election and what we may have to do. I did this because I felt I would really be misunderstood and still may be. The situation we are facing in Iraq is in many ways what Saddam Hussein kept from happening because of the way he ruled his people. The people who are opposing us are not the ones who would have opposed Saddam but the reasons are in many ways the same.

Saddam kept order in Iraq by using the Sunni population of Iraq to enforce his rule. Though he ran a secular state and seemed to have little interest in the religion he was born into (the Sunni sect of Islam) he gave special privileges to the Sunni’s to keep his power base. He was brutal in his method of control as most military dictators are and because he was soldier and a General he seems to have thought that killing some people was “fun”. Regardless, he kept the various Islamic sects in Iraq from fighting each other for control by force, using the soldiers and police he recruited from his Sunni power base. The other sects tried to contest for power from time to time but they lacked the means and weapons and any such “uprisings” were brutally smashed.

Now the Sunni’s are fighting for the control they had under Saddam’s rule and because we are less organized and unsure of what we are trying to do and the Sunni’s are better armed than the sects they once controlled we are less effective in stopping their “uprising”. When we do corner them we kill them just as quickly as Saddam killed his enemies, a just dessert one might say. In a very real sense our Army and Marines have taken over the job that Saddam's army and police used to do. If this election doesn’t work and Iraqis are not able to police their own country then the longer we stay in Iraq the more like Saddam’s people we will become. We will be using our military strength and the lives of our service men and women to support a government that could not exist without us. We will most likely have to use harsher and harsher methods to put down the “uprisings” that will continue to happen and they won’t all be “Sunni insurgents” The Kurds and other sects will begin to show their displeasure about how things are going. In the end we may become not that much different than what we replaced. I don’t want our brave men and women to have to live with that.

Assuming that the election works and the Iraqi’s are able to form a stable government and the means to try to keep some peace among it’s antagonistic factions the violence still will not end. But at least we will have accomplished what we set out to do and we will be able to bring our troops home. This has to be our primary goal now, sooner if the election fails and hopefully not too much later if the election succeeds.

Wayne, if somehow the positions of the different sects were reversed we would still see “human” bombs. It is an out-growth of some aspects of the Islamic religion and there are examples of similar “martyrdom” in Judo-Christian religious history. A fairly large segment of Muslims, while not willing to do it themselves, still look upon a suicide bomber with honor and respect. As for killing their own people, unless I’m wrong about this, if by accident a fellow “true believer” is killed they believe he will go to heaven along with the bomber. Anyone else that gets killed is not considered “their people”. If they run out of “infidels” to kill they are given enough incentive by their clerics to turn their bombs on “believers” who just don’t make it to the “true believer” level.

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