[Dean's World] Dave Price: No Exit Strategy For Iraqis

[notify at powerblogs.com]

Posted by Dave Price:
No Exit Strategy For Iraqis
http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1157559813.shtml


   Interesting [1]description of a press meeting with Iraqi VP Adel Abdul
   Mahdi.

     For the most part, our queries were politely and somewhat
     laconically dismissed. Iraq is not in a civil war, Mahdi said, and
     doesn't need more U.S. troops. It has a constitution and elected
     government, and thus there is no need for an international
     conference.
     So what is the solution? "Time -- that is it," Mahdi replied. "A
     nation like Iraq needs time. The elections for a permanent
     government happened eight months ago. We have been in office a few
     weeks. The people who we have in office have never governed. These
     people come from oppression and a bad political system."

   This is something that received short shrift in the press, and even
   from supporters of the war. The transformation from brutal police
   state, dotted with official rape/torture centers, with eternally
   recurring civil wars and invasions of its neighbors to a free
   democracy whose government makes some attempt to behave responsibly,
   albeit with some level of unofficial violence, is a remarkable one.
   This feat is is no more cancelled out by the concomitant carnage than
   the 400,000 deaths in the U.S. Civil War mooted the morality of the
   freeing of the slaves or the necessity of preserving our union.
   We must face our failures, but we cannot disregard our successes
   either, lest they be allowed to slip away, to the terrible detriment
   of the majority of Iraqis who are courageously striving to make Iraq a
   better place.

     Mahdi is a brave man, with nerves of steel. Two years ago, while
     meeting with another group of journalists, he learned that his
     brother had been killed in an insurgent ambush; he stoically
     continued to answer questions.

   That's commitment. Dismissing the whole effort as a waste and turning
   our backs on these people would be an error of epochal proportions,
   and a moral travesty besides.

References

   1. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/03/AR2006090300740.html