to Sultan

Submitted by Sidda (United States), Nov 10, 2005 at 17:09

Sultan, you have a right to your opinions. The truth of the matter is that every country does what it deems to be in it's best interests. Countries who share the same basic core values often find that they have many common interests; although, sometimes those interests do diverge. But, democratic countries tend to use diplomacy with each other to work out their differences rather than war. Also, geopolitics is extremely complicated--kind of like trying to juggle 15 plates in the air without dropping one. Sometimes you think you address one problem adequately, and you mess two more up.

Others have addressed this subject with you, but I will try in my own way. I understand what you are saying about the Kurds, because from your perspective, creating a separate Kurdistan could cause unrest among the ethnic Kurds within Turkey, and as a Turk you would not like that. That is understandable. I could go off on a tangent about multiculturalism here, but I won't.

My understanding of the reasoning behind America's invasion of Iraq is this: For 25 years, America has had their interests attacked by Muslim terrorists all over the world. To save space, I won't name them all here. This really seemed to escalate during the 1990's when Al Qaeda grew in ferocity. Our response to the attacks was tepid at best; we did not seem to understand the serious threat that was posed to our national security. After 9/11, things changed. We knew that we could no longer just treat attacks as police actions; we didn't want to wait to be attacked again. Thus the Bush doctrine of going after not only the terrorists, but countries who harbored or supported terrorists.

Saddam had defied something like 17 U.N. resolutions after the cease fire agreement in the 1991 Gulf War. The U.S. and the U.K. had to maintain the no-fly zones and had planes getting shot at all the time. He wasn't coming clean about his WMD plan. We haven't FOUND WMD, but we still don't know what happened to the ones we knew he had. It wasn't up to us to find the WMD, but up to Saddam to prove how, when, and where he had disposed of them. He never did do that. And remember that even if he didn't have the WMD, his scientists certainly retained the capability of reconstituting any of those programs once the world had turned it's attentions elsewhere. The Bush administration deemed that to be a threat to our national security in a post 9/11 world.

The theory is if we can get a stable, democratic government in Iraq, this will set the stage for the people to prosper and for democracy to spread into other neighboring totalitarian-ruled countries. If the people have freedom and prosperity, they will be less likely to want to go off and blow themselves up in the name of jihad. I don't know if it will work, or if we picked the right battlefield to start, but I think that is the general idea. The fact that the extremists are fighting so hard to keep Iraq from becoming a democracy leads me to believe that we just might be on the right track. However, in the end, only the Iraqi people can win this. We cannot win it for them.

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