Nemesis by Chalmers Johnson. Should be required reading for everyone wanting to cast a vote--certainly for anyone in public office.

Johnson explains in well-worded English, free of hysteria or profanity, exactly why the rest of the world hates us.

I did inhale.

which makes the politics of this war so perverse, yet interesting. Whatever you say we ought to have known, is yet something we did not know, and you have likely to overreach to say we should have known or to say we should not have known, as the writer you attack does.

In any event, it involves a big martialing of facts and pseudo-facts to go one way or the other on this.

Furthermore, to say that we did know is not something that you will be able to say until years from now, when historians will objectively search through what has been handed down to them, long after we're all looking up at the grass(assuming warming does not toast it to hay) from below.

I don't care to get into that, which is just words.

One reasonable approach is to figure out how to get out of there with as little harm to the Iraqis and to our soldiers as possible. I'd like to see a bit of that here.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=counterfinality

http://mauberly.blogspot.com/

"Where were our intentions not honorable?" 1) choosing to overthrow a regime that had not struck at us or our interests. 2) choosing to invade a foreign nation to seize its oil assets. 3) de Baathification in order to weaken the central government and set in place a puppet government 4) dismissing civil disorder and violence as being unimportant early on (and perhaps for a programmatic purpose... such as givng reason to prolong the occupation.) 5) trying to get the Iraqis to sign an oil contract that no fully sane, fully independent, unoccupied nation would consider signing. There is nothing of good intent anywhere in this list. Nor is this an exhaustive list of the malice that might be proven or assumed to exist on the part of the administration and its provocateurs.

As for knowing or not, I'm afraid I'm incredulous. It seems impossible to me that any person who simply knew that there was a serious rift between Sunni and Shia that streched back a millennium and was aware that this had manifest itself as local violence in Iraq up until the point of the invasion should have been able to predict the outcome. There were only three possible outcomes, ever: A state dominated by a repressive Sunni minority, A theocratic state dominated by Shia majority a la Iran. Or devolution into a never-ending ethnic conflict and partition.

As far as a moral duty to Iraqis to stay or to go, I think this is simply not a meaningful idea. The idea that we stay or go solely on this basis assumes we know much more about the nature of their country, their politics, their history, their stable institutions, and their culture than they do. It's presumptuos, it's arrogant, it's almost certainly wrong, and at some point it is definitely counterproductive.

Most Iraqi's just want us out. They are willing to claim the problems as their own.

...rhetoric that I have seen from representatives of pretty much all political factions in the United States is this - initial involvement in Iraq was to a non-trivial degree sold and justified on the basis of America's perceived "obligations" (in the the sense of its role as the supreme military power and ultimate underwriter of the international alliance structure [and it is that role that ultimately led its security partners to "let" America embark on this little endeavour, BTW]) and now the withdrawal is to a large extent being justified on the basis of a renewed appreciation of America's perceived "interests".

Talk about getting it backwards - those of us on the outside of the American political process would have a great deal more patience for this sort of colossal fuck up were those two reversed - intervene based on a rational assessment of national interest, withdraw when your obligations have been discharged.

"When intelligence producers realize that there is no sense in forwarding to a consumer knowledge which does not correspond to his preconceptions, then intelligence is through." ~ Sherman Kent

A lot of people were involved for no doubt different reasons and some may have had the noblest of intentions. But the "we" has to be the U.S. government and Paul Bremer's 100 laws for Iraq killed any legitimacy that any decent argument might have. You can't argue that we were trying to "help" Iraq or the Iraqis when we imposed on them laws that we simply WILL NOT HAVE for ourselves. Examples:
Order No. 17: Full immunity from Iraqi laws for foreign contractors. (Would we allow Toyota or Siemans management to kill Americans with, say, unsafe products that they knew about and be immune from American laws?)
Order No. 49: Caps income tax at 15% for both corporations and individuals. (Would we accept a foreign power's control of our tax structure, imposing on us the amount of public spending we can do and how we fund it?)
The 100 orders, imposed by U.S. force while U.S. forces could not maintain basic order or protect the country's health and safety infrastructure, aimed at turning Iraq into a pluckable chicken for international corporations.

If our intentions were so honorable, we would let the "liberated" Iraqis determine for themselves access to and control of the resources and economic structures within their borders. Instead the U.S. government has assiduously pursued the exploitation of the prostrate country, while claiming to be seeking the good of the ungrateful people by giving them "democracy". That is, they can have elections for officials who cannot change the 100 Orders. That's not democracy and it's certainly not honorable.