Speculation
Mar. 30th, 2003 09:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eyelessgameWhen I liken our invasion of Iraq to the 1938 invasion of Poland, I am not really being facetious. The neocons who run the government have published papers, and talk frankly (if only quietly, not at news conferences), about remaking the entire Middle East, ideally by "domino effect", realistically by military force.
So the plan is to invade one nation after another throughout the Middle East. First Iraq, then Iran and Syria, then Saudi Arabia, then all the rest. Leaving, of course, devastated rubble in our wake. Ideally we will implement democratic governments; realistically we will impose military dictators. (We've done this before. The Shah, for example. Look how well that turned out.)
Ideally, we will see terrorist organizations disband; realistically we will see terrorism increase. Not this month or next; the major terrorism retaliation for the presence of our troops in Saudi Arabia in 1991 took place a decade later, remember.
As we realize the threat posed by Moslem fundamentalists, we will have to start cracking down on their organizations, and everyone associated with them (say, attending the same mosques), in our Middle Eastern occupied territories. Ideally just by winning their hearts and minds; realistically with something like concentration camps.
Or perhaps we will not get there. The plan of the neocons who run the government will result in exactly this, but they're fortunately showing themselves to be arrogant and ideological enough that it interferes with their effectiveness. Perhaps they'll stay that way and we'll stay quagmired in the early parts of this plan.
Or perhaps we'll get really lucky (Karl Rove dies of a heart attack, say) and Bush won't win the 2004 election. Don't count on that, though.
So the plan is to invade one nation after another throughout the Middle East. First Iraq, then Iran and Syria, then Saudi Arabia, then all the rest. Leaving, of course, devastated rubble in our wake. Ideally we will implement democratic governments; realistically we will impose military dictators. (We've done this before. The Shah, for example. Look how well that turned out.)
Ideally, we will see terrorist organizations disband; realistically we will see terrorism increase. Not this month or next; the major terrorism retaliation for the presence of our troops in Saudi Arabia in 1991 took place a decade later, remember.
As we realize the threat posed by Moslem fundamentalists, we will have to start cracking down on their organizations, and everyone associated with them (say, attending the same mosques), in our Middle Eastern occupied territories. Ideally just by winning their hearts and minds; realistically with something like concentration camps.
Or perhaps we will not get there. The plan of the neocons who run the government will result in exactly this, but they're fortunately showing themselves to be arrogant and ideological enough that it interferes with their effectiveness. Perhaps they'll stay that way and we'll stay quagmired in the early parts of this plan.
Or perhaps we'll get really lucky (Karl Rove dies of a heart attack, say) and Bush won't win the 2004 election. Don't count on that, though.
Like 1938, or like 1979
Date: 2003-03-31 09:48 pm (UTC)Let me repeat that - many people living in the Soviet Union in the late 1970s thought that having the USSR invade Afghanistan would be a net good for the people of Afghanistan.
You can understand why the current US action looks similar, and why calling the operation "Iraqi Freedom" sends shivers up their spines - you don't free a country by bombing it.
I was trying to find evidence that would make this current action qualitatively different from the USSR invasion of Afghanistan; I failed to find anything that they found significantly different. (As one of them put it, "Middle America and middle Soviet Union differ in only language")
So, I guess I'll be on the lookout to see what's different - and by "different", I mean other than "well, the Soviets were the bad guys, but we're the good guys."