The American Iraq adventure
September 25th, 2006 by ashish
Everytime there is talk about the Iraq invasion by the US and consequent happening, the topic gets heated up. People have very strong views on this topic and not at all afraid to express them. What happens in such a case is that the discussion gets polarized.
Maybe we need to step back and look at the time period when the actual invasion happened and see the scenario at that time. Iraq was under a brutal dictator who considered the people of his country as his property. He could at any time take their life or get them tortured for any supposed crime or thought. When the whole world already knew what chemical weapons could do, he had used them against his own people (the Kurds). When another sect of people in the south of his country (the Shias) revolted against his brutal rule, he put down the revolt the only way he knew - through a brutal supression.
Such a person did not deserve to rule a country. The last century has seen a number of dictators who could do incredible things against their people. Some of them were removed and prosecuted for war crimes, a lot of them were not. Hitler, Mussolini, and a few others lost battles or popular rebellions and were uprooted, their crimes exposed. A lot of others - Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, etc were never actually exposed for the mass murderers that they were. But the belief that the world had was that slowly people were moving towards more democracy and empowerment. In the midst of all this, you had a dictator and his clique brutally ruling over an ancient civlization. No matter how this is debated, he had to go and then treated like the uncommon criminal that he is.
Iraq now however is certainly not the way that the US would have envisioned when the invasion happened. A lot of things that could have been handled better after the invasion did not turn out the way that they should have. Now, at this point of time, things could go bad or go better. We would all like to believe that the people of Iraq will realize that all this violence is not doing them any good. In addition, the US military, for all the losses it is taking is a big force of stablization and is doing a lot of good in trying to make Iraq a better place. If Iraq can in the end turn out to be good example of a democracy, it will set an excellent example for the whole region.
