Posts by Neil Morrison
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I don't deny that the US forces were there over the next decade to keep the pressure on Iraq
I can accept that, but maybe you changed your mind in the later post.
My initial point was that there were difficulties with the US and British containment of Saddam. One major one, a major source of propaganda for bin Laden, were the US troops in Saudi Arabia necessary to keep the pressure on Saddam.
The PBS account from 1996, during the Clinton years, as well as most things I've read, indicate that while Saddam was still around the US had little option other than to have troops in Saudi Arabia. That was one of the prices that was being paid for Saddam's containment.
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Terence, 80 words, I'm not an expert on how the US military logistics in the Gulf works and what is and what is not possible, but given the fact that the US troops were out of Saudi Arabia the minute Saddam was gone suggests to me that they didn't have many alternatives and getting those troops out was very high on their list of priorities.
The BBC article is a good account. The account of Clinton and his officials in the PBS article is also I think an accurate indication t of US thinking on this.
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I don't see that there's any great danger from Maxim using the term Social Justice in a manner that suits them. So they might say "Social Justice means no gay marriage". How many people are going to be swayed by that that wouldn’t be swayed by "gay marriage is wrong" anyway?
This sort of reasoning about the power language reminds me of magic spells and has as much reality. Politicians are always choosing words to suit their argument, the Greeks called it rhetoric, the art of persuasion has been around for a long time and all parts of the political spectrum practice it.
And I think it is wrong to say that conservatives are unconcerned with social justice, they just emphasise different, conservative, methods of achieving this.
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The need to deter Saddam after 1990 was superfluous
Not so, US troops in Saudi were there as part of the no-fly zone regime. The minute Saddam fell they were pulled out. The BBC reports on this - US pulls out of Saudi Arabia
Saudi Arabia is home to some of Islam's holiest sites and the deployment of US forces there was seen as a historic betrayal by many Islamists, notably Osama Bin Laden.
Bin Laden used American presence to justify anti-US attacks
It is one of the main reasons given by the Saudi-born dissident - blamed by Washington for the 11 September attacks - to justify violence against the United States and its allies.The US was stuck - as long as Saddam remained in power they needed to keep troops in Saudi Arabia which was inflaming Muslim opinion.
PBS also gives a background to US troops in Saudi.
As for the 1st Gulf War the Saudi's were sufficiently impressed by Saddam's menace to allow 500,000 troops US to camp out. I really doubt they would have done something so unpopular if they hadn't felt threatened by Saddam. US missile defenses also saved Saudi Arabia a bit of grief.
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The wahabists can count more than a few well-educated, modern young men in their ranks. Indeed, their recruiting methods concentrate in part on wooing young men in Western universities. They're a little like the old communist states in that respect, and perhaps others too.
True, I was thinking more of the tribal areas in places like Pakistan. They provided many of the young men for those Wahhabist madrassas. The conservative trends (hostile to women, gays, modernism etc) are quite strongly related to communities that are in the process of moving from one world to another. It's another complicating factor in Iraq as well.
And not appear soft on the US, there's a similar process there as well. The troubling religious tendencies are related to the Irish Scotts who settled the Mid-West, taking with them a conservative family based culture with honor killings etc that to a degree still has a strong influence. Much like the Sicilians in New York. It's not just religion but the social history from which it comes.
Jared Diamond has lots of useful insights into how biology and geology conspired to set all these different states of progress in different societies.
Troops in Saudi were necessary for protecting oil supplies not the sanctions regime.
I think they were mainly there to stop Saddam invading which did protect oil supplies. But having then to deter Saddam made life difficult for the US since having foreign troops in the land of Mecca was a big problem for Muslims. The US was caught a bit there.
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Really? I'd say the scourge of nationalism which is just tribalism writ large still haunts Europe and North America.
I agree that nationalism brings its own set of problems but I would argue that the nation state is a less violent means of social organisation than tribalism. (Violent death is proportionally greater in tribal societies than in nation states - even when one includes 20th century Europe). Rule by families is always feud ridden.
James, I disagree that there is such a fundamental flaw in Islam, or that there is any significant difference with Christianity. I do agree that at present there are more Muslims that aspire to spread their religion violently but I believe that is caused by young men coming from conservative tribal backgrounds and feeling alienated by modernity. With a few lunatics like bin Laden thrown in.
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There's certainly a lot craziness out there being done by Christians and the psychological processes are the same with crazy Muslims but there's one difference. There are still quite a few Muslim countries moving from conservative tribal-based societies to centralised democracies. Pakistan, Afghanistan etc. It's really the tribalism that's to blame for there being more trouble overall with Muslims than Christians, not the religion as such. It's just that most Christian countries moved away from tribalism a while back.
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sanctions could have been further lifted (carefully and in a targeted manner). If combined with a continued rigorous inspections regime it would have been possible to do this and prevent SH from developing WMDs.
That's true that sanctions had become more fine tuned - the oil for food regime was part of that. In fact smartening up the sanctions further was the Bush Admin's initial approach to Saddam.
But those sanctions and the rigorous inspections relied on the enormous US and British military presence on Iraq's borders. One problem was having US troops in Saudi Arabia - that wasn't going to be easy to do for too much longer. Other problems were France pulling out of enforcing the no-fly zones and Russia pushing for the end of all sanctions. There was a bit of unraveling of the containment going on.
If those US and British troops ever left then Saddam was going to go back to doing what he always was doing. Despite the no fly zones he still created a lot of trouble for the Kurds.
For their efforts to contain Saddam the US and Britain became the objects of a very successful propaganda campaign by Saddam and his apologists. There were already terror actions against the US in the 90s justified by the containment regime.
My feeling is that after 12 years US and British patience wore thin. That suggests to me that the best way of avoiding the invasion would have been a more reliable international consensus as to how to deal with Saddam. But as we are seeing with Sudan that's not easy to achieve.
Another other important issue is what the demise of Saddam's regime would have looked like. The most recent example of the collapse of a dictatorship in an ethnically and religiously mixed country is Yugoslavia. The invasion has proved too costly in human lives but eventually an international intervention may have been required.
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this degree of sectarian violence, or even sectarian hatred, is unfamiliar to them.
That's because Saddam had ruthlessly suppressed his opponents. There was sectarian violence - against the Kurds and Shiites. The guards that so dismally taunted Saddam at his execution did so because they were Shiites and their community has suffered greatly under Saddam.
The notion there is no history as to why Sunnis are bombing markets and Shiites have formed death squads does not make sense. Saddam's regime was Sunni based - elements of them are fighting for the power they lost. The Shiites were persecuted by Saddam and now are settling scores and making sure they are never subjugated again.
I did say that possibly having more troops might have limited this, I'm not not faulting the US, but I did not notice "More Troops" being a prominent anti-war slogan. But there's a tendency to see Iraq through US actions and forget that it's a society with its own dynamics and the trouble between Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds goes back hundreds of years.
And I've said I don't have any great alternatives and for those who opposed the war to put some forward for scrutiny. If you are saying you would have supported a better planed war then I would agree with that.
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These people have almost all been killed or fled the country
True to an extent but there's still a sizable secular opposition to the encroachment of fundamentalism. One disadvantage they had was having no preexisting organisational structure. The only secular structure was the Ba'ath Party. On the other hand the Shiite leadership had the full array of their religious institutions at the disposal for political organisation. So Sistani got to be the major player.
a catastrophe that could have been prevented if the US had deigned to provide security
A bit unfair, the US didn't see, but should have and planned for, the insurgency coming but when it did it did fight back but had too few troops. I'm in two minds about whether more US troops could have prevented the cycle of Sunni/Shiite violence - both sides seem pretty determined to seek revenge or hold on to power. Maybe or maybe that's what was going to happen when the Ba'ath Party lost power and it would have been better not to have US troops there at all.