Do you think Iraq has the potential to become a great nation?

Answer 1

~"Great Nation" by whose definition? They didn't do too bad when they were known as Babylon. Before the unjustified, illegal and immoral invasion by Georgie the Younger, they were doing just fine relative to the rest of the Middle East and far better than most of the 'Third World'. Militarily, they were certainly a "great nation" in their part of the world. Yeah, the masses didn't share in the oil wealth, but when is the last time you spent a few nights in the projects in NYC, Detroit, Newark, LA, etc., or tried to find a meaningful job in Appalachia or the Rust Belt. Rumor has it that life is not a bed of roses on Indian Reservations, either.

Will they become a western democracy? Who knows? Why should they? It will take a generation or two of propaganda, occupation, indoctrination and subjugation to drill such a foreign and repugnant concept into them, and it might require a religious revolution something akin to the Protestant Reformation before it can work. And why should an outsider, interloping invading nation like the US force that on them? Heck, I don't much like anything the right wing neocon fundamentalists have to say, but that doesn't give me the right to kill Bill O'Reilly or Pat Robertson.

Why should they have to become a 'great nation'? What right does any other nation have to interfere in the internal affairs of a sovereign state? Oh, invasion is ok if one doesn't like what is going on in another country, right. Then I guess North Korea, Iran, Cuba, India, Pakistan, Syria or any number of other governments should have the option to nuke Washington whenever they want. After all, we have stockpiles of WMDs beyond belief and not only threaten to use them, but have. And we have proven to be a threat to foreign leaders and nations (Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Cuba, Vietnam, Nicaragua, Haiti, Cambodia, ad infinitim) and we have harbored, armed, trained or otherwise supported international terrorists and criminals like Bill Calley, Ernest Medina, Werner Van Braun, Ferdinand Marcos, Shah Pahlavi, Osama bin Laden, Oliver North, Nguyen Van Thieu, Ngo Dinh Diem (before we assassinated him) and on and on and on.

You know, much of the world looks at the US and sees a glutton of a nation which abuses its military might, wastes the world's resources, pollutes the world's oceans and atmosphere, threatens the globe with nuclear, chemical and biological devastation, is rampantly immoral and godless, is hypocritical to the nth degree on issues of human rights and liberties and which is a continuing threat to peace and prosperity and to human existence itself. They may not consider the US to be a 'great nation' if viewed in humanist, egalitarian or theological terms.

Thanks in advance for all those thumbs down, but isn't it all relative? So it goes and may Goobleskeera watch over you.

Answer 2

what can I say? I mean it's been a whie since America help reinsutited their country.. I mean every country has the potential but Iraq is struggling through to suceed. Unlike some people , I believe through the people's hard work and intelligent they may succeed. I mena look at America.. We are considered to be one of the most powerful country.. Look at the history how the people had to fight to suceed.. Nobody believed in the 17 or 18th ? century, they thought it was a colony... Anyway back to the subjet, I think America should slowly start leaving Iraq , allowing the people not to relies on us so much.. Even if Iraq has bombing problem, they have a government and an army made by American.. So it does and how do you mean by great? Like America or Japan?? They are both suceesful countries evrybody knows..

Answer 3

Of course not. The problem with Iraq is that it isn't what you might call a "natural" nation. It isn't one homegeneous group who are really hoping they can make things work for the best. It's a thrown together, hodgepodge state, a leftover from the British Empire. It's got Sunnis, Shiites, Kurds, and whatever else, all just thrown together, and none of them really want to be thrown together. The only thing that kept them together in the past was the brutal enforcement of authority by dictators. Now that glue has come undone, I don't see how, or why, the people of Iraq will ever come back together.

Answer 4

iraq will not exist as a single nation in ten years time.

the reasons why are as follows

1. in the north is kurdistan. this is, with or without usa's support, going to be invaded shortly by turkey in order 'to quell rebel resistance of the P.K.K.'. the P.K.K. are kurdish rebels fighting for a homeland against turkey for the last 40 years. tirkey is planning an incursion at the moment and will take the northern province of iraq - kurdistan - under its soverignty under the guise of national protection. it may not be news in america now but it is fact in europe.

3. in south is the sh'ia are (the british militry area) this area looks to iran for its political and religious influence. the british militry are pulling out of this area do to the lack of hostilities in this area and relative political stability. this stability is coming from iran's influence on the area and belief that if there is no occuping force iran will more or less gain control. this will happen and will either be an iranian state or incorporated into iran in the next 5 years. saddam saw this area as a hotbed of resistance to sunni rule and persecuted the sh'ias inthisarea for many years especially in the iran - iraq war 1981 -1988

3. the sunni heartland. bagdad and central iraq. this is what one would consider saddams iraq as in this is where the ba'ath party support came from. this will become a single state as no-other ethnic group will allow the rule of sunni muslims dominate them after post saddam iraq. sunnis make up only 33% of the iraqi population.

in short iraq will be divided among ethnic lines. its unity as a single state was drawn up by the british after world war 2. it will divide into its self governing ethnic goups either as 3 separate states - kurdistan, iraq (sunni iraq) and southern iraq. or else will be divided among turkey, iran and sunni iraq but it will not be a country in 15 years and this will be seen when the us army pulss out

Answer 5

you're only crammed with fake guidance, are not you? on the time, and that's what concerns, the guidance confirmed a sparkling hyperlink. sparkling adequate for congress to ok the plan. to declare that we've killed greater Iraqi electorate than Saddam is thoroughly faulty. what number hundred thousand Kurds did he kill? undergo in suggestions that Kurds stay in Iraq and are Iraqi electorate. that's the fault of all media that spin this conflict to make united statesa. appear like the undesirable guy. They finished sympathize with people who decapitate journalists, yet won't see that we are justly protecting ourselves against an enemy that doesn't value human existence the least bit.

Answer 6

No. It is a purely artificial state created by the British after WW1.
After the latest disastrous occupation it will split into three parts with the Kurds controlling the north, the Sunni controlling the centre and the Shia controlling the south.

Answer 7

NO.
Most of the people would appear NOT to care about anything but themselves, or killing the opposing factions.

As long as they refuse to 'think outside the box(or sandbox)" - it will never happen.

Answer 8

Kill everybody there... and build a MCdonalds...SO the Isralian people can go get some chicken nuggets and forget about hate and war... its so simple when you think about it.

Answer 9

i think we should complete wipe them off the globe and then give whatevers left to isreal.

Answer 10

It's greed, not ideology, that rules the White House


Why the US wants Iraq's debts cancelled - and Argentina's paid in full

Naomi Klein
Tuesday December 23, 2003
The Guardian


Contrary to predictions, the doors of Old Europe weren't slammed in James Baker's face as he asked forgiveness for Iraq's foreign debt last week. Germany and France appear to have signed on, and Russia is softening.
In the days leading up to Baker's drop-the-debt tour, there was virtual consensus that the former US secretary of state had been sabotaged by deputy defence secretary Paul Wolfowitz, whose move to shut out "non-coalition" partners from reconstruction contracts in Iraq of $18.6bn seemed designed to make Baker look a hypocrite.


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Only now it turns out that Wolfowitz may not have been undermining Baker, but rather acting as his enforcer. He showed up with a big stick to point out "the threat of economic exclusion from Iraq's potential $500bn reconstruction" just as Baker was about to speak softly.
The Iraqi people "should not be saddled with the debt of a brutal regime", said White House spokesman Scott McClellan. No argument here. But when I heard about Baker's "noble mission", as George Bush described it, I couldn't help thinking about an under-reported story earlier this month. On December 4, the Miami Herald published excerpts from a state department transcript of a meeting on October 7 1976 between Henry Kissinger, then secretary of state under Gerald Ford, and Admiral César Augusto Guzzetti, Argentina's then foreign minister under the military dictatorship.

It was the height of Argentina's dirty war to destroy the "Marxist threat" by systematically torturing and killing not only armed guerrillas, but also peaceful union organisers, student activists and their friends, families and sympathisers. By the end of the dictatorship, approximately 30,000 people had been "disappeared".

At the time of the meeting, at the Waldorf Astoria in New York, much of Argentina's left had already been erased, and news of bodies washing up on the banks of the Rio de la Plata was drawing increasingly urgent calls for sanctions. Yet the transcript of the meeting reveals that the US government not only knew about the disappearances, it openly approved of them.

Guzzetti reports to Kissinger on "good results in the last four months. The terrorist organisations have been dismantled". Kissinger states: "Our basic attitude is that we would like you to succeed... What is not understood in the US is that you have a civil war. We read about human rights problems but not the context. The quicker you succeed, the better."

And here is where Mr Baker's present-day mission becomes relevant. Kissinger moves on to the topic of loans, encouraging Guzzetti to apply for as much foreign assistance as possible before Argentina's "human rights problem" ties US hands. "There are two loans in the bank," Kissinger says, referring to the Inter-American Development Bank. "We have no intention of voting against them ... We would like your economic programme to succeed and will do our best to help you."

The World Bank estimates that roughly $10bn of the money borrowed by the generals went on military purchases, including the concentration camps from which thousands never emerged, and hardware for the Falklands war. It also went into numbered Swiss accounts, a sum impossible to track because the generals destroyed all records.

We do know this: under the dictatorship, Argentina's external debt ballooned from $7.7bn in 1975 to $46bn in 1982. Ever since, the country has been caught in an escalating crisis, borrowing billions to pay interest on that original, illegitimate debt, which today, at $141bn, is only slightly higher than that held by Iraq's creditors.

The Kissinger transcript proves that the US gave money and political encouragement to the generals' murderous campaign. And yet, despite its now irrefutable complicity in Argentina's tragedy, the US has opposed all attempts to cancel the country's debt. And Argentina is hardly exceptional. The US has used its power in the International Monetary Fund and World Bank to block campaigns to cancel debts accumulated by apartheid South Africa, Marcos in the Philippines, Duvalier's brutal regime in Haiti and the dictatorship that sent Brazil's debt spiralling from $5.7bn in 1964 to $104bn in 1985.

The US position has been that wiping out debts would be a dangerous precedent (and rob Washington of the leverage it needs to push for investor-friendly economic reforms). So why is Bush so concerned that "the future of the Iraqi people should not be mortgaged to the enormous burden of debt"? Because it is taking money from "reconstruction", which could go to Halliburton, Bechtel, Exxon and Boeing.

It has become popular to claim that the White House has been hijacked by neo-conservative ideologues in love with free-market dogma. I'm not convinced. If there's one thing the Wolfowitz/Baker dust-ups make clear, it's that the ideology of the Bush White House isn't neo-conservatism, it's old-fashioned greed. There is only one rule that appears to matter: if it helps our friends get even richer, do it.

Seen through this lens, the seemingly erratic behaviour coming out of Washington starts to make a lot more sense. Sure, Wolfowitz's contract-hogging openly flouts free-market principles of competition. But it does have a direct benefit for the firms closest to the administration. Not only are they buying a debt-free Iraq, but they won't have to compete with their corporate rivals in France and Germany.

The entire reconstruction project defies more neo-con tenets, sending this year's US deficit to a cartoonish $500bn, with plenty handed out in no-bid contracts, creating the kind of monopoly that allowed Halliburton to overcharge by an estimated $61m for importing gasoline into Iraq.

Those looking for ideology in the White House should consider this: for the men who rule our world, rules are for other people. The powerful feed ideology to the masses like fast food while they dine on that most rarefied delicacy: impunity.

www.nologo.org