What The Devil Do We Do With Iraq?

I'm not old enough to personally remember, but the history I learned told that we had some of these same problems in Europe and Japan after 1944-1945. We dealt with them differently and far more severely I am told, so that they burned themselves out. The point is that we rode it out, and the situation got better. The secret seemed to be reformation of the police in the country.

I think the reason we did this in Europe is that we remembered what happened in Russia when we didn't go in to support the elected government after WWI; the mob won, and the result was Russia allied with the Nazis until Hitler invaded them during WWII. The Russians never were really our allies, and promoted the Cold War until the country got sick of them. This could happen in Iraq, but I don't want to wait for 50 years for the Iraqi citizens to throw out the trash.

But our country, through the press, seems to say that our soldiers should die rather than even one innocent civilianperish, and the counter-revolution is better than the elected government. (Remember, media, that these people ELECTED the current government, not the radicals).

With our rabid anti-war media reporting, we don't have the guts to take the measures to burn this out which would probably take some wider-scale and less-surgical fighting. For example, our policy of no first firing will get more of our men killed, particularly as the Iraqis learn to shoot straight.

The solution I see is for us to duplicate what we did in Europe, to work to get the Iraqi police/army to take over its own protection. We can only leave when we supported the formation and training of police and army which are committed to the Iraqi government (not to a warlord or a mullah) to protect the country and stamp out the counter-revolution by force.

To do less will put us in a similar situation to Russia (even today) and Iran, with the mob running the government.