Is Iraq as a nation gone?

[Poiuyt]

Rep Steve Kagen (D-WI) thinks so as he wrote in this editorial in his hometown newspaper:

Rep. Steve Kagen column: We've done our job in Iraq; it's time to go

Today, our nation is no closer to an end to our occupation of Iraq, and we still have no clear exit strategy to our costly involvement in their religious civil war.

==

Gen. Petraeus' report highlighted three facts about the Iraqi quagmire.

First, Iraq is President Bush's war, and he is the only person today who can end it. There are simply not enough votes in the Senate to overcome his presidential veto of legislation designed to bring our involvement in Iraq to an end.

Second, and most importantly, the tribal peoples of Iraq do not want to live together. The minority Sunni Arabs, the Kurds in the north, and the Shiite majority do not share a common vision of national unity or a central government — period — as reflected in their centuries-old sectarian violence and the unending slaughter of innocent civilians.

And third, Iraq is already gone. Iraq has gone the way of the former Yugoslavia — and it is not coming back.

more -

http://postcrescent.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070916/APC06/709160458/1036/APC06

[Prisoner_Number_Six]

1. Dunno about Iraq, but America's sure as hell on the brink.

Thank you, Ms. Pelosi.

[The Vinyl Ripper]

2. Iraq never was a "nation" in the sense that we think of such.

Iraq was cobbled together by the Brits right after WWI.

The method the Brits used to rule the world was to divide and conquer.

Set one faction of the Wogs off against another faction and give arms and training to the weaker faction until they got too strong. Then you arm and train another faction to take the first one on.

The Wogs hated the Brits, but they hated the other Wogs even worse so the Brit strategy worked.

Which is pretty much how Saddam ran Iraq too..

[Beerboy]

4. I had a discussion w/ someone last week re: your point;

the victorious Allies in WW1 dispossessed Imperial Germany and the rest of the Central Powers of their colonial holdings throughout the world while increasing their own.
Syria and Lebanon became French Mandates under the League of Nations, while Palestine, Jordan, Iraq, Egypt and the Sudan were to be administered by the Brits after the carving-up of the Ottoman Empire.
Iraq is an illusion, a figment of lines drawn on a map almost a hundred years ago by people that didn't live there and are now long dead.

[americanstranger]

3. I was reading interesting comments at Larry Johnson's blog...

...Someone posted a comment about Naomi Klein's new book The Shock Doctrine and posted this excerpt:

"A right-wing journal in the US pronounced Blackwater “al Qaeda for the good guys.” It’s a striking analogy. Wherever the disaster capitalism complex has landed, it has produced a proliferation of armed groupings outside the state. That is hardly a surprise: when countries are rebuilt by people who don’t believe in governments, the states they build are invariably weak, creating a market for alternative security forces, whether Hezbollah, Blackwater, the Mahdi Army or the gang down the street in New Orleans.

The emergence of this parallel privatized infrastructure reaches far beyond policing. When the contractor infrastructure built up during the Bush years is looked at as a whole, what is seen is a fully articulated state-within-a-state that is as muscular and capable as the actual state is frail and feeble. This corporate shadow state has been built almost exclusively with public resources (90 percent of Blackwater’s revenues come from state contracts), including the training of its staff…. The vast infrastructure is all privately owned and controlled. The citizens who have funded it have absolutely no claim to this parallel economy or its resources.

The actual state, meanwhile, has lost the ability to perform its core functions without the help of contractors."

Interesting take. Basically, people think that Bush went into Iraq without any planning for what came after the invasion - but they did have a plan, only it was a plan that had nothing to do with bringing Democracy to Iraq. Instead, they had a plan to bring naked, aggressive capitalism to Iraq while simultaneously hollowing out the governmental workings of Iraq and guaranteeing that any US corporation working in Iraq would be beyond the reach of the law.

Iraq as a country is gone. And in addition, Iraq's government had been castrated and bled dry. The government of Iraq couldn't run the country at this point no matter how badly they want to - but the appearance of a functioning Iraqi government is a smokescreen to hide the wanton, rapacious capitalism that is really running the country now.

So, yeah, Iraq is done. And we should get out before the Iraqis decide to rise up and kill everyone. It's gonna happen.

- as

[The Vinyl Ripper]

5. That's true to a point..

But I think the corporations are finding out that Iraq is just too damn violent to make much of a profit there. Most of the profit gets eaten up by security costs.

I think you could be right about the Iraqis, they may just get to the point where they don't care any more and decide to take a bunch of us out in a blaze of glory.

[sandnsea]

6. Tom Delay's "petri dishes"

They are desperate to get their libertarian form of capitalism to work somewhere. They want to prove government is not necessary, except for defense and to solve crimes and put people in jail. The Marianas didn't work, and the pesky Democrats regulated, (though not enough). There's still an enormous amount of "re-education" required for Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, UAE, China, India, etc. So why not plop right down in the middle of the oil, liberate people from a tyrant, and turn the place into a complete free market paradise. Wohoo!

They didn't plan a government because, with the free market in place, their theory says you don't need government.

Same thing with Katrina. They just cannot comprehend the planning and organizing required to make a community function, or put that structure back together after it's been ripped apart.

[Tesha]

7. Yup.

Look forward to:

o Kurdistan, with perpetual border skirmishes with
Turkey and other surrounding countries.

o Shiistan, with perpetual...

o Sunnistan, with perpetual...

Iraq was a fraud patched together by the British
a long time ago, and just like Yugoslavia when
Tito passed on, without its strongman in place
to hold it together, it's now fissioning back
into its natural component parts.

The real question for me is: "Do you think this
holds any lessons for this allegedly-United States
of America?" I kind of hope so.

Tesha

[cali]

8. Yes. Read the transcript

of Nir Rosen's interview with Amy Goodman. He makes a compelling case.

[mmonk]

9. Yes, just like the United States.

What will emerge from either is anyone's guess.