Quote: (06-20-2014 12:54 AM)Chaos Wrote:
This thread needs some Sp5.
Thanks, Chaos. I've been reading this but not commenting because the whole thing makes me sick. I could write a book on it. Maybe I'll title it "Thanks, Chaos." A few thoughts:
I watched the whole thing happen over years, often in the inside. The "coalition" was not prepared for the extent of degradation of public infrastructure over the years of wars and sanctions.
Saddam really fucked that country up by starting the wars with Iran and Kuwait, which led to the sanctions. So in 2003, water and sewer was leaking and overflowing, electricity production and distribution was a mess, healthcare was poor, etc.
The rebuilding contracts after 2003 were ridden with corruption, overcharges, attacks by insurgents. So not enough progress was made quickly enough, although things are better in those areas.
Earlier this year, I saw that malls are being built in Baghdad and the quality of public works was much better. There's more electricity, too.
I was kind of optimistic, saw the government starting to get its act together with regard to service delivery, but it was still a very centralized and inefficient system. There were local governments, but Maliki was able to keep them weak and broke through some legal maneuvers. This shut out a lot of people from any power, not just the Sunnis, but local people in places like Basra.
As the Scottish referendum shows, sometimes devolving power leads to more demands for devolving power until independence, so it's hard to say how things would turn out with more local power. Iraqi political history over the last ten years has been a spoils system and I think the country could have stayed together as long as everyone was getting a decent slice of what was a rapidly growing pie - GDP growth has been above 5%, up to 10% or so for a few years. Oil production was steadily increasing. The local political elites, including shaykhs and businessmen, in places like Nineveh and Anbar just didn't think they had enough say. Maliki overplayed his "Commander in Chief" card.
Libertas's article is accurate in the depiction of the current crisis and the sectarian roots of it. But it's not so much that electoral democracy is futile in Iraq - Iraqis seemed to take to it well - it was that the elections did not mean much.
That was because Maliki was able to strip the power from both the parliament and the local government through legal maneuvers from an obedient Supreme Court. It would be like Obama taking the power from Congress to initiate legislation without his approval, and taking almost all of the budgets and lawmaking power of state governments.
So there were a lot of people all around Iraq who felt shut out and powerless.
The other cause of this mess was the utterly stupid and mysterious drive to depose Bashar Assad in Syria. Remember that Syria was a military ally of the USA, UK and France in the 1991 Gulf War, and that they "helped out" after 2001 by providing intelligence and even torturing suspects that the USA sent them.
Assad was just a standard Arab dictator, maybe not even as bad as Mubarak was or the Saudis or the Khalifas in Bahrain. Syria was not that bad a place - as long as you weren't agitating for more political freedom, it was pretty tolerant for everyone otherwise.
But the west and its "allies" the Saudis, Qataris, etc. wanted him out and armed the rebels. This strengthened the ISIS and Al Nusra guys.
Why was it so important to get rid of Assad? I think it was because it is the first step in a campaign to regime-change Iran. Utterly insane. Like in Ukraine - the schemes are blowing up in our faces.