Cobb

Whether it's a highly-paid Mercenary or a uniformed grunt getting his hazard pay cut, the death of any American citizen in a foreign conflict touches us all. We should agree on this.

And we should remember the fallen - all of the fallen, be they Soldier or Soldier of Fortune.

But I ask only this:

Please remember that some of the fallen first took a solemn vow to defend our Constitution and our nation against all enemies, foreign and domestic. They sacrificed their lives and their sacred honor for us. Think of that when you're tying a yellow ribbon around the tree.

For all the rest, use a green ribbon.

It is inconsistent with America's purpose in Iraq, which is not to bully people around or teach them a lesson in anything other than post-tyrannical life. Self-governance is the lesson, and we can only hope that the new government of Iraq has learned something from our forebearance.

The question is, are the people or Iraq ready for such a lesson? There seemed to be no significant proactive opposition or resistance to Saddam. While the people may have been interested in the idea of self-determination, there seems to have been no synchronized, popular uprising in the wings. I suspect that as a result of trying to rush this (and doing so under false pretences at that), things are going to get worse before they get better. In a country where people are not ready to stand up for themselves, power will be seized by an unrepresentative minority, or terrorists will make use of the power vacuum.

Ah, but that is where we have been missing, in our media lessons, a bit of true history. That bit is that the Kurds, among others, rebelled against Saddam Hussein in his war with Iran. Saddam gassed them precisely because they were in open rebellion. The same bit applies, so I am told, to the Shia who in a choice between conscription into Saddam's secular army to fight against the Ayatollahs of Iran, chose the spirit of Iranian side.

This is part of the lesson I learn in suggesting that Hussein was purely genocidal against 'his own people'. The fact was that he didn't own them.

So we might go back to Bush 40 and lay some blame at his doorstep in that the reason he did not aid the Kurds and Shia was that they were in spiritual cahoots with Iranian clerics. File that under 'internal matters'? Probably not.

Interesting, thanks for the info.

I don't know much about the beliefs that dominate either the Kurdish or Shia groups. Are they interested in freedom, or just in forcing their own sectarian / tribal agendas on the rest of the population?

By the way, I came across the snippet on the psychohistory list. Haven't verified it.

"...the civil war in Iraq will commence. Now that the junta has appointed a "civil" minister of defense who is (a) Kurdish and (b) whose father was Saddam's top henchman in curbing Kurdish rebellion, the US forces have made yet another fatal mistake."

One of our European colleagues offered the [preceeding] prediction of events allowing there to be a major conflagration in Iraq shortly. This prediction is based on the appointment of a Saddam loyalist as defense minister -- someone who had been largely responsible for the violence done to the Kurds in the past.

If we take this mistake by Bremer alongside the Defense/CIA mistake in adopting Chalabi as their favorite for Iraq leadership, we have grounds for distress. Chalabi, a convicted embezzler in Jordan, has admitted to feeding false information to the Bushites about Saddam and about what actions to take after the military campaign ended, has embraced Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani's Shiite demands for popular voting (which would lead to an Iranian-style theocracy), has his own US-paid militia and seems to have been spreading huge sums of money around to bribe many into forming alliances with him. Indeed, there have also been several references to how the future will be under "President Chalabi".