Slamlander wrote:
Reality check:
Forrest wrote:
1) Surrender operations to an international body (the U.N., or some other coalition, preferably including other middle-eastern states either way).
Forget it. Bush screwed that option when he went unilateral. The EU, for one, is saying "we told you 'No' and we meant 'No'. Now you know why we said 'No'." Chirac(FR) and Schroeder(DE) both took a lot of shit from America for refusing to go along with the invasion. Do you remember the "Freedom Fries" thing? That wasn't the worst of it. American boycotts of EU business and tourism did a lot of economic damage over here.
I'm in Swiss Romande, Francophone country. While they have no great love for the French, they caught a bunch of the anti-French sentiment and the anti-french jokes too.
If you are thinking that Bush's last little junket healed things up over here, then you are delusional, as delusional as Bush is. The EU is fairly united in this, they don't like being called cowards because they refuse to be stupid.
In case you are wondering, the UK isn't really a part of Continental Europe, we just let them think they are. One sometimes humors the retarded
Forrest wrote:
2) Offer our full military backing for whatever their solution is.
That's not a convincer. For one thing, that requires trust and they don't quite trust the US anymore. Bush did a good job there as well.
So you're saying that the EU, UN, et al would not taking kindly to the U.S. saying "we fucked up and don't know how to fix it without being total dicks, what do you think we should do? Whatever you think is right, we'll do it." You think they'd all say "ha ha you fucked it up you figure out how to fix it"? Seems rather immature of them.
(Disclaimer: I just happen to live in America; I don't take sides on issues based on nationality or any sort of group identity. I'm just me. So, don't assume that me calling an international body [possibly] immature means I'm defending America's actions; I think going to war in Iraq was a stupid idea).
My general rule of thumb is that inter-group ethics are perfectly analogous to inter-personal ethics. If some person came and attacked some other person ostensibly for their own good - say, trying to stop a suicide attempt or something - and then didn't turn the issue over to the appropriate community to oversee the issue, we'd just call that assault and/or kidnapping. The US 'preemptively' invading Iraq *could* (under counterfactual circumstances) have been legitimate if it was, say, to aid an internal group of freedom fighters trying to free their country from tyranny. But even if that had been the case, if the US just invaded and handled the whole thing themselves and ignored the will of the international community (as they have been), that's just a plain old invasion if not outright conquest.
I'm just saying the US has been stupid and unethical so far in meddling in the affairs of another country without international backing, and that we should reverse that policy immediately; we broke it so we've got to fix it, but WHAT SHOULD WE DO TO FIX IT? Turn the answering of that question over to the international community, to make sure we don't just do something to make things even worse. The UN et al could still give us directives that make things worse, but at least we'd have checked with others beforehand so it's not just our own stupidity screwing things up more.
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Forrest wrote:
3) Suggest as a solution that we (the international community):
i) Allow the various Iraqi factions to form their own regional governments as they please (e.g. allow Kurdistan to secede if they like).
The Kurdistan issue will bring in Turkey so fast that it'll make your head spin. They will invade, period. They damned near did it anyway, while Bush was having his little tea party. Bush had to promise them that Iraq wouldn't be allowed to break up.
It may sound callous to say, but if that happens then it's Turkey fucking things up, not us, and they should be appropriately punished for it. This is another reason why to involve the international community; if the U.S. takes it upon itself to be the World Police without international backing, they just look like a big bully. But if the whole international community says that secession is OK, and some particular nation has an issue with some particular instance of secession, then that nation will have to consider in it's choice of actions that the whole rest of the world will back the right of whoever to secede.
This right of secession is a general ethical principle for me. It's never right to force one group to be beholden to the arbitrary rule of some other group. (And before you go "then why are you talking about international communities and such", there's a difference between a group being a good and responsible member of a larger group-of-groups, and a group being beholden to to another particular group. It's the same difference between being a good citizen and being someone else's slave).
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Forrest wrote:
ii) Offer defense again all foreign powers (incl. other parts of the state formally known as Iraq) to any faction that manages to establish domestic peace within their region. ("Domestic peace" also including just governance, so we don't end up helping despotic tyrants).
That does not resolve the ethical problem. The US broke the Iraqi egg. It is the US's responsibility to either make a nice omelette or repair the egg. It's the old 'you broke it, you own it!' principle.
Forrest wrote:
iii) Encourage diplomatic and trade relations between the various factions / states, possibly leading toward eventual reunification; and if not, no big deal.
So you would abandon the Iraqi people after turning their world into shit? Nice guy you are. This is why Amrican reputation suffers so.
What ethical problem does this not solve? I think it solves the (apparent) ethical dilemma nicely. Our options at present appear to be "be evil tyrannical despots and whip all of Iraq into shape forcibly" and "pull out and let them all go to hell". My solution to the dilemma is "help anybody who asks for it".
Instead of trying to impose order top-down across a region that doesn't entirely like us in the first place, focus on helping those individual towns, etc, who *want* U.S. forces there. Let those towns ally with each other into larger groups, districts, and regions as they please. Iraq is already practically in a state of anarchy; so just call it anarchy and then let them (and help them) rebuild from the bottom up. If you wind up with a number of smaller states instead of one big state in the end, I don't see the problem there, so long as they're at peace in the end.
That's what I meant by "no big deal". Not that it doesn't matter whether or not things get resolved peacefully in Iraq - it certainly does - but that it doesn't matter if Iraq maintains some singular identity as "Iraq". If it turns out that the people in that region don't all want to be one country, then what's the problem with that? Maybe some people in one part of the country want other people to be part of that country, but if those others don't want to be a part, tough shit for the other guys.
EDIT: Whoops, broken quotes.