The issue is not to understand all the shards of broken glass but to know how they were kept together before we smashed them. We operate under the illusion that we can deal with all the pieces, one by one, and then pull them together into a mish-mash good enough to earn us free slurps, all the licks we want, of the oil. The contradictions in Iraq are not just tribal but also generational, confessional and educational and criminal. Worst of all, since our defeat of Saddam in Gulf War I we have combined Western and Arab and Iraqi gangsters into gangs operating nasty illegal operations with the oil as those with the poppies for heroine in Afghanistan. In fact, not as a nation but at the individual 'entrepreneur" level, we have been as big a set of multivaried bandits as have the Iraqis and Afghan ones collaborating with first the British and then us and our Arab allies.
When we devastated order in Iraq we raised even further the flag of crime. Now we are trying to turn it into a "banana republic" by creating a large army with its gun turned inward to keep the population orderly while we rape the oil. Have we learned nothing from our 19th Century Latin American ventures?
Iraq needs policemen whose families live comforatably and safe in America and who are payed by us so we can count on them to enforce the laws of Iraq. Without an external force invading Iraq, as were the North's regulars invading South Vietnam, there is no reason for an army anywhere but on the borders; but there is need of a national police that enforces the law homogeneously throughout the country. The courts and the prisons should be Iraqi run so that their government does not seem totally out of the loop. But Americans training an Iraqi army with its guns turned inward is nothing but what Nir Rosen properly called "oil imperialism."
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The issue is not to understand all the shards of broken glass but to know how they were kept together before we smashed them. We operate under the illusion that we can deal with all the pieces, one by one, and then pull them together into a mish-mash good enough to earn us free slurps, all the licks we want, of the oil. The contradictions in Iraq are not just tribal but also generational, confessional and educational and criminal. Worst of all, since our defeat of Saddam in Gulf War I we have combined Western and Arab and Iraqi gangsters into gangs operating nasty illegal operations with the oil as those with the poppies for heroine in Afghanistan. In fact, not as a nation but at the individual 'entrepreneur" level, we have been as big a set of multivaried bandits as have the Iraqis and Afghan ones collaborating with first the British and then us and our Arab allies.
When we devastated order in Iraq we raised even further the flag of crime. Now we are trying to turn it into a "banana republic" by creating a large army with its gun turned inward to keep the population orderly while we rape the oil. Have we learned nothing from our 19th Century Latin American ventures?
Iraq needs policemen whose families live comforatably and safe in America and who are payed by us so we can count on them to enforce the laws of Iraq. Without an external force invading Iraq, as were the North's regulars invading South Vietnam, there is no reason for an army anywhere but on the borders; but there is need of a national police that enforces the law homogeneously throughout the country. The courts and the prisons should be Iraqi run so that their government does not seem totally out of the loop. But Americans training an Iraqi army with its guns turned inward is nothing but what Nir Rosen properly called "oil imperialism."
Daniel E. Teodoru
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