Molly Ivins: Just like Saddam?

[Dudley_DUright]

For all I know, we may have just done something smart in Fallujah by hiring ex-Iraqi troops to take it over, but it's sure not what we said we were going to do when we started to go in. Then, the photos from the Abu Ghraib prison horror hit. Let's hear it for privatization again. We just cannot get a break over there.

I think we're at a point when it's useless to continue the argument over whether the glass is half-empty or half-full. Things are going very badly in Iraq. I'm sure some of our professional patriotic bullies will denounce this as unpatriotic pessimism, harmful to the morale of the troops, etc. I think it's more important to recognize reality.

Even though I still consider getting rid of Saddam Hussein an unmitigated good, we may have lost the peace very early on. Peter Galbraith, writing in the May 13 New York Review of Books, reports that the initial looting right after the war ended was unbelievably costly in both monetary terms and Iraqi support. Others have concluded that the corruption, so familiar under Hussein and now again in full flower with the private contractors, has so wiped out respect for our efforts that Iraqis are concluding we are "just like Saddam." For us to continue killing Iraqis for their own good is not a policy likely to redound to our benefit.

Galbraith recommends not a partition of the country, but a federation in which the Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds are each allowed to choose pretty much their own form of government. The Kurds could keep their own governing council, the Shiites would choose an Islamic republic, and who knows what the Sunnis want.

more...

http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=16888