Gandalf can you explain how the Shites are responsible for the democracy and not America?

freediver wrote on Jan 27^th, 2016 at 7:46pm:


Because the shiites fought for it - fought the US occupation (peacefully) who were attempting to install Chalibi and Allawi and all their merry bunch of undemocratic exiles.

I don’t see any possibility of Britain and the US allowing a sovereign independent Iraq, that’s almost inconceivable. If you think what its policies would be likely to be. But there has been an astonishing failure to achieve what was pretty clearly the original war aim: to make sure that Iraqis don’t rule Iraq. If they’d wanted Iraqis to rule Iraq they would not have supported [former Iraqi dictator] Saddam Hussein when he crushed the Shiite rebellion in 1991 and they would not have imposed the kinds of sanctions that made it impossible to send him the same way as other tyrants. But it looks as if that goal might not be attainable, amazingly. I don’t think it is obvious any more. The constellation of forces is such that it should have been easy. But I still find it hard to imagine that the US cannot crush the armed resistance, which has limited internal support and almost no external support. It takes real genius to be incapable of crushing such weak opposition.

I mean, they are—one of the effects, the main effects, of the U.S. invasion of Iraq—there are many horrible effects, but one of them was to incite sectarian conflicts, that had not been there before. If you take a look at Baghdad before the invasion, Sunni and Shia lived intermingled—same neighborhoods, they intermarried. Sometimes they say that they didn’t even know if their neighbor was a Sunni or a Shia. It was like knowing what Protestant sect your neighbor belongs to. There was pretty close—it wasn’t—I’m not claiming it was—it wasn’t utopia. There were conflicts. But there was no serious conflict, so much so that Iraqis at the time predicted there would never be a conflict. Well, within a couple of years, it had turned into a violent, brutal conflict. You look at Baghdad today, it’s segregated. What’s left of the Sunni communities are isolated. The people can’t talk to their neighbors. There’s war going on all over. The ISIS is murderous and brutal. The same is true of the Shia militias which confront it. And this is now spread all over the region. There’s now a major Sunni-Shia conflict rending the region apart, tearing it to shreds.

Now, this cannot be dealt with by bombs. This is much more serious than that. It’s got to be dealt with by steps towards recovering, remedying the massive damage that was initiated by the sledgehammer smashing Iraq and has now spread. And that does require diplomatic, peaceful means dealing with people who are pretty ugly—and we’re not very pretty, either, for that matter. But this just has to be done.

Quote:

That’s nice, FD, but that’s not the right answer. Did Uncle establish democracy in Iraq?

A simple yes or no will suffice.

That’s nice, FD, but that’s not the right answer.

SO the Iraqis threw away the chance to develop such a democratic society through the democratic election process at the first chance they day.