The lead piece on Salon.com this morning outlines Ten ways to argue about the war. It summarizes responses to most of the common questions from adovcates of the war. For example here is the first one:
“I read your article on withdrawal of American troops,” my correspondent began, “and questioned the lack of discussion of the following…” (His comments are in bold.)
1. Nothing was mentioned about improvements in Iraq (elections, water and energy, schools). No Saddam to fear! Water and energy delivery as well as schools are worse off than before the U.S. invasion. Ditto for the state of hospitals (and medical supplies), highways and oil production. Elections are a positive change, but the elected government does not have more than a semblance of actual sovereignty, and therefore the Iraqi people have no power to make real choices about their future. One critical example: The Shiite/Kurdish political coalition now in power ran on a platform whose primary promise was that, if elected, they would set and enforce a timetable for American withdrawal. As soon as they took power, they reneged on this promise (apparently under pressure from the United States). They have also proved quite incapable of fulfilling their other campaign promises about restoring services and rebuilding the country; and for that reason (as well as others), their constituents (primarily the Shiites) are becoming ever more disillusioned. In the most recent polls, Shiite Iraqis now are about 70 percent in favor of U.S. withdrawal.
There are nine more, and they give good reponses to the various misinformation statements that war supporters usually have.
Also did you hear what Iyad Allawi said last week about the situation in Iraq? Don’t forget Allawi was the guy hand-picked by the Bush administration to lead Iraq after the “turnover of sovereignty to the Iraqi’s”. This means that he is nominally one of “Our Guys” over there. In an interview with the Observer last week he said:
November 27,2005 | LONDON — Human rights abuses in Iraq are as bad now as they were under Saddam Hussein and could become even worse, the country’s former interim prime minister said in an interview published Sunday.
“People are doing the same as Saddam’s time and worse,” Ayad Allawi told The Observer newspaper. “It is an appropriate comparison.”
Allawi accused fellow Shiites in the government of being responsible for death squads and secret torture centers and said the brutality of elements in the new security forces rivals that of Saddam’s secret police.
Although Allawi is a Shiite, he is secular in his politics and is running separately from the Shiite religious parties in the Dec. 15 election. His comments appear to be an attempt to appeal to Sunni voters, who claim their community has been unfairly targeted by the Shiite-led security forces.
“People are remembering the days of Saddam. These were the precise reasons that we fought Saddam and now we are seeing the same thing,” the newspaper quoted him as saying.
Iraqi officials have played down reports of rights abuses, insisting they are lies created by their enemies.
So now that we know there were no weapons or links to 9/11 and the only argument we have left for the invasion was to remove a tyrant, we find that now we are the tyrant.