Iraq - General discussion
 

Amazingly we don't have a thread on Iraq yet.

The results of the last elections were published today, as expected the Shia Islamic party has won the majority (not as much as expected though, the results have probably been slightly rigged so it wouldn't get the absolute majority).
Anyway, congratulations to the US for turning a laic country into an Islamic republic, good job.

Seriously, Bush is the Republican's answer to Roosevelt.
:rolleyes:

On of the key problems the US troops have in Iraq, among other things, is that they cannot differentiate between Iraqi local and Arab foriegeners. The Iraqi insurgents that shoot at US troops have every reason to do so, being that US are an occupying force. But it is the Arab foriegners like Al-Zarqwi (sp?) that are blowing up random people (Shiites really) and are the real impediment to peace in Iraq.

Of course the Americans troops have no idea how to tell the difference between the foriegners and the locals, so they see everybody as potential enemies. What would you expect when the President himself had no idea what the difference between Shiites and Sunnis before invading Iraq, let alone the fact that those two groups did not get along.

No comment on Iraq. But I thought I post this quote as it is relevant to the topic (Iraq).

"I'm not the expert on how the Iraqi people think, because I live in America, where it's nice and safe and secure." —George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., Sept. 23, 2004 :laugh:

"I wish I wasn't the war president. Who in the heck wants to be a war president? I don't." —George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., Aug. 6, 2004 :rolleyes:

I was seeing on the news that the Islamic pressure is more and more intense in Iraq, everywhere there are 'groups' who strongly 'encourage' the population to follow Islamic rules more and more stictly (the previous regime was authoritarian, but Islamic rules were not especially enforced).
A very visual and characteristic change is that more and more women are now wearing the Islamic veil, that was quite rare under the previous regime, and that's now becoming the norm. I highly doubt that those women have freely decided to start covering their faces, they are being forced to, like what happened in Afghanistan when the talibans took power.

I haven't heard to much news these last times but I suppose there was a free election......so .....if the previous government has stayed at the head of Iraq, we 'd surely have heard here: "Of course, it's a corrupted government which is just a puppet manipulated by the American Government...."
People from Iraq has made another choice. So....

Me , I've always screamed that I was against Islamic Governments but you,Amber..... you are For Freedom......freedom of expression (here, The People has freely expressed its choice...)......so I don't understand your post...
What is your problem with Islamic parties and the fact that Iraqi women could wear the Islamic veil, Amber, ?

I'm no expert on the Middle east but surely Saddam's Regieme would be preferable to a Islamic republic?? Soon Iraq WILL be Afghanistan v2. :/

I don't agree with Saddam's Methods but least he kept to himself. Unlike a Certain President :/

Veil or not veil , you are still treated like a dog if you have a misfortune to be born in these parts of the world. Saddam's Regieme or Islamic republic ? Big choice !:rolleyes:
To live in constant fear that your son/husband/father will never come back home after the day work/and would be beaten to the pulp/vanish forever OR cover yourself in a veil garbage and be not able even cross your own doorstep without a man ! Spoiled for choices... I highly doubt that those women have freely voted for the Shia Islamic party !

You make it sound like i support Islamic regimes, when have i ever said that i support Islamic regimes? I am an atheist and a laic, i am against any intrusion of religion in political and public affairs.

My point with the war in Iraq was that the situation *after* the war would be no better than the situation *before* the war, and that's what we see. Iraq went from a military regime to a fundamentalist regime, there will be no more freedom now than there was then, the oppression will be of a different kind, but military or religious, it's still oppression.
The sad thing is that thousands of people have died during the war and continue to die, and for what, just to change the nature of the oppression? All the people who have died because of that insane war have died for nothing, absolutely nothing.
The only winners in the end are fundamentalists, they have gain power in Iraq and the hate between the West and the Arab world has never been stronger, no good has come out of this war.

Like i said above, i am against parties that are based on religion (the Shia Islamic party) or even ethnicity (the Kurdish party), political parties should be solely about political ideas, not about what religion their members follow or what ethnicity they belong to.

And the Islamic veil is a form of oppression.

YES,IT IS.

Not if you choose to wear it, obviously.
Secular repressive regimes like Iraq choked all forms of opposition so the only channel to express one's opposition would be in a mosque. The rise of women wearing hijabs and Islamic fundamentalism may be in direct defiance to the former regime.

The same logic could be applied all across the Middle East.

Or, of course, they may be oppressed.

Yesterday the 100th British soldier was killed in Iraq.

I think Blair should send his son there and worry every night when he goes to bed whether his son is still alive. That way he could start to understand a little bit. :bum:

umm.. I wish people around here would get worked up about over 2,000 dead Americans. I'm not looking forward to saying goodbye to my best friend in August when she gets shipped out to Iraq for 18 months. I say fuck bush and his goddam fucking war. That's all I'm saying about Iraq... I'm sick of talking about it.

Yeah I know a lot more Americans have died, but in comparison with how many British troops & American American troops have been sent it must be about the same percentage? :ithink: :ithink: I dunno, just a guess.

I'm just mentioning what was said on the news, blame them for not having a huge feature about dead Americans.

New Abu Ghraib footage has been released showing how US troups torture their prisoners, it also gives us a glimpse of what is going on behind the walls of Guantanamo.

But what's REALLY interesting is the fact that they didn't get as upset over the Abu Graib scandal as they did over those silly Muhamed cartoons. That's the power of fanatism. They'd have less trouble dealing with humiliation of themselves and their peers than humiliation of their dogmas.

Probably because all Arab countries treat their prisoners in the same way and because human life is worthless to them compared to the prophet's honor, but it's still no excuse for a western country to do the same, those pictures could have been taken in a concentration camp of the 3rd Reich or a gulag of the Soviet Union, and it's appalling that the US isn't treating its prisoners better than those totalitarian states.

Also interesting is the fact that those pictures are banned in the US and that Americans are probably the only people in the world who have not seen them, the only thing that seems to interest American media at the moment is Dick Cheney's hunting accident, yeah… :rolleyes:

Gulag yes, Concentration camp... I don't think so.

But you know what, I'm getting sick of the White House getting scandal after scandal after scandal and the media, the White House, The Democrats and the American people all collectively not giving a shit.

Torturing prisoners of war, abandoning your own people in the face of a hurricane, lieing about going into war, being complicit in some of the worse corporate scandals in history, having any associations to the worse lobbyist to have ever graced Congress, unnecessarily ending the lives of over 2,000 soldiers and over 100,000 Iraqi civilians, still not catching Osama, or Al-Zawari, or Al-Zarqawi, fucking up international relations most probably for good, outing a CIA agent, shooting a person in the face and lieing about the facts surrounding the "accident" (I call it practice) etc, etc, etc...

You know what's the saddest part about all this; all it takes, all it takes to get this government out of office is a fucking blowjob.

Shit! I'll do it for the love of humanity!
And then I kill myself.

Death toll in Iraq since the US invasion now estimated at 655,000 dead.

:done: They are great to assassinate their brothers!;)

Do you call that Resistance?
When German/Nazi armies have invaded our country, there was resistance....
Members from Resistance were trying to bomb German truck, German trains, German authorities....not French...

I'm may be a fucking stupid, facho, extreme-right, pro-American, Nazi, tyrannic person...but sorry, whatever the reason, I don't understand people who kill their brothers!!!

That's the basis for the whole problem actually. Suniis and Shiites harrdly consider themselves "brothers". Now throw in a whole bunch of other ethnic and religious minorities to that mix and the mess Iraq is in right now becomes pretty understandable. Iraq's basic problem (one which Saddam opposed with sheer totalitarian brute force) is it's heterogenous populace.

I think the basic sin lies not with the Attack on Iraq in 03 but rather a few administrations back when some silly people decided to make Saddam Hussein their volatile ally. This current generation is just paying for mistakes commited in the past.

The head of the British army has defended his comments that UK troops "exacerbate" security problems in Iraq and should withdraw "sometime soon".


****


I am disgusted by this

I call that a tragedy. One which could have been avoided.

Most of those people would still be alive if the country had not been invaded, and i don't think that 600,000 dead is a fair price to pay to remove a dictator (or even to avenge the 3,000 dead of the WTC attack). If the US really had to remove the Iraqi regime, they should have come up with a much better plan.

And they can't say that they "didn't know". Everybody who knew the region and Iraq in particular had warned the Americans that the country would break into civil war, the scenario we're seeing today was described in details to them back in 2002 (even by the British) when they were starting to plan the invasion, they were warned.
If you're going to invade a country made up of several rival ethnic groups which is only held together by a dictatorial regime, you *must* have a well prepared post-war plan to avoid anarchy. The US had none.

Now, the partition of Iraq in 3 parts seem to be the only exit to the current situation, but even the partition will raise new problems.

The Shia part will have most of the petrol resources, and will be a satellite of Iran.

The Sunni part won't have any resources at all, and since the Sunnis were the ones in power before the invasion, they will continue to be quite angry with the new situation, i don't see them stopping violence anytime soon. Plus, there isn't much difference between Iraqi Sunnis and Syrian Sunnis, so Syria will control more or less the Sunni part, Syria may even be tempted by an annexation after the Americans are gone.

The Kurdish part will have significant resources (and therefore money) which will be seen as a threat by Turkey, and possibly Iran. Both countries include a part of Kurdistan and the independance of the Iraqi part will be seen as a possible first step toward a full independant Kurdistan. If Turkey feels really threatened (and it doesn't take much for Turkey to feel threatened), it may very well invade the Kurdish part in a preemptive strike (the excuse would be to "protect" the Turkomans, Turk-related people embedded in Iraqi Kurdish territory, Turkey has already mentioned how they were "oppresed" to prepare the road for a possible invasion).

Haku, for once we agree. However, I was talking to my brother about it a couple weeks ago when he was home, and he said while splitting the country in three may solve the problem, it's easier said than done. A few US Senators have been proponates of that idea since the end of "major" Combat, yet have been unable to think of a way to accomplish it. It would mean more US and international involvement, which most people are against. We're trying to get out of Iraq, not stay there longer.

If they split the country into three seperate countries, what would you do with the kurd's left in the Shite part? Uproot them? Don't you think that would cause more animosity?

Oh i agree, it's going to be a slow process and many people are going to die in the mixed and disputed areas. But Iraq has recently passed a law which is a first step toward a federation of autonomous regions, so i would say that the partition process is now on its way. Iraq will probably slowly disintegrate like Yugoslavia.

Well, ethnic cleansing is actively going on right now in Iraq, Shias are targetted in the Sunni part, Sunnis are targetted in the Kurdish and Shia parts, i'm suspecting that by the time those autonomous regions are created, most minorities will already have moved or 'be removed'. Which part goes to which autonomous region will be decided by referendum on a province by province basis next year, so of course in the meantime each majority group is going to eliminate as many minorities as they can from the provinces they control to have a clear win in the referendums. The coming months are not going to be pretty.

Shiites , Sunni .

Can anyone tell me please on which part of their religion these two disagree and why they at each other's throats ? It's not like Quran was written yesterday , do they hate the guts of each other's for centuries ?? So much for peaceful religion...

This article explains things concisely. :)

He made a mistake by not killing himself.

I don't think so, he knows what he's doing.

For the Iraqi insurgency, he will become a martyr executed by Americans and their Iraqi collaborators, a powerful symbol to continue the fight against the occupation.

I heard about it on the news, but like haku said, this will only bring him closer to god... :rolleyes: Not like he did anything wrong! :rolleyes:

I thought you aren't allowed to commit suicide if you're a "real" muslim? Obviously he would never break this rule! So he gets the enemies to kill him.

He was far from a "real" muslim. Infact Iraq under his reign was surprisingly secular incognito - that's actually the only way to rule such a country with an iron fist I reckon.

About his sentence. Nothing special. He means nothing in international politics these days. He's just a symbol of things past. I'm against capital punishment in general, even in such extreme cases where we're dealing with a tyrant/mass-murderer. No one should be eligable to take one's life unless it's consenting euthanasia.

Will he become a martyr for insurgents? Probably. But honestlly... they don't need any more martyrs. Extreme Islamic fundamentalists have perfected the art of goading people into doing things. They don't need more martyrs. And if they needed some they'd just make them up. :p

Offtop:
Queenie your "location" is soooo distracting. :p

I think he was, in the eyes of those who worshipped him... just like any other suicide bomber, for example. Even though they are not doing the right thing according to islam. Argh difficult to explain what I mean!

Offtop:

Quote:

Queenie your "location" is soooo distracting.

Lol, you have no idea how many comments I've gotten for my location, it's so great :cool:

Oh, he is undoubtedly guilty of many crimes, and i would have wholeheartedly supported the verdict if it had been life in prison, but death penalty is abhorrent and i am absolutely against it no matter who is to be executed, and hanging is a particularly vile and humiliating form of execution

Saddam Hussein is going to end up as an Islamic martyr but ironically he started his career as more or less a communist revolutionary. The Baath party is essentially Stalinist and when it seized power, it made of Iraq a secular country with no official mention of Islam anywhere.

You are good people...
I too am against death penalty but not because it is cruel, but because I don't think it is a punishment.

I agree with Haku, Capital Punishment is wrong in any case. I also think it's abhorrant that they are only giving him 30 days for an appeal. Even in fucking Texas, where they are known for killing first and asking questions later, an inmate on Death row has minimum 2 years to get the first appeal and there's more than one, I believe they get 3 but don't quote me. No matter it's still wrong and soooo middle ages. Especially a hanging, there's no reason to torture a person before you murder them.

I'm afraid that Suddam's execution will solidify the insurgence and make it impossible to fix Bush's fuck up's in Iraq. Tis' a sad day in the world today.

I'm too a little disturbed by this Death Penalty just because he won't never realize the amount of horrible murders he has ordered.

Now about "hanging"....I'm a little surprised here...why should he be beneficing of a favor special treatment?
Just because he was a "chief", a "president"? Just because he has ordered a lot of assassinations, certainly more than any citizen of his country?

I'm against Death Penalty so it perturbs me a little. But I won't be crying about him....His attitude during his trial was absolutely unberable...
I remember once: one guy came to explain all the tortures he was suffering by his fault, and Hussein was ignoring him as a dog...just complaining about the fact he has just one white shirt to go to his trial.

"By Hanging" is the rule to kill people in his country. So I prefer to have compassion for the ones who died by his fault in the same conditions (I should say "almost the same conditions" cause they were certainly more tortured before to be killed than he was) , or who will die,in the future, than for him.

I had a teacher who was against Saddam and was put in jail for it. Horrible conditions, torture... he sat in a tiny cell with 10 other men, with only a bucket of water... and once one of the men died and was left in that cell with all the others, for several days. It was just horrible to hear his stories. Of course there were people who went through even worse tragedies, but it is just an example from real life that I thought I should share.

I second that
Saddam Hussein doesn't deserve it at all, being in jail 'til his death sounds more "cruel"

The majority of the Western World ( including Tony Blair ) expressed their disagreement of carrying out the death sentence ( for Saddam Hussein )
Everybody except one. Guess who... ;)

:dknow: ...:ithink: ...aaaah!!!Arnold Schwarzenegger - terminate...terminate...terminate!