Comments on: A coup in Iraq?

By: Barry

Barry — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 13:36:32 +0000

“Iraq today is about as sovereign as the nations of Eastern Europe were before 1989; its domestic political activity matters, but only within the limits laid down by the United States.”
No, otherwise there’d be no war raging. The trick is that any government installed solely by the US would have zero control over Iraq; they’d sit in the Green Zone, and die the day that they left it. Any government which does exert significant power over Iraq will be one over which the US has only a little control.

By: Valuethinker

Valuethinker — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 06:52:54 +0000

From Reuters newscast yesterday, Sadr’s aide has been released at the PM’s insistence.

By: joseph duemer

joseph duemer — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 23:04:40 +0000

JFK should never have signed off on Diem’s murder & the CIA should never have been involved in the plot, but Diem would have gone down sooner rather than later even without US meddling. He was a leader without any real base outside the Saigon ruling class that had collaborated with French colonialism. I’m not sure al-Malaki’s case is the same, though the analogy is tempting. It is possible to argue that had the US simply announced a pullout from VN in 1963 that the Southern government would have crumbled, the Communists would have taken over–and, yes, there would have been plenty of bloodshed & retailiation & persecution, but maybe not as musch as happened in 1975–and the US would have been spared ten years of hopless war. None of this addresses the strategic differences between VN & Iraq. VN was never more that a chip in a Cold War poker game; Iraq, on the other hand, is a sort of geo-poolitical omphalos.

By: Mike Kelley

Mike Kelley — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 19:41:14 +0000

Feckless thugs think they are tough guys and don’t have to talk nice