#1 If indeed we turn up another Saddam Hussein, however much less Napoleonic (in the conquering, rather than reforming, sense) we'll have recreated the problem we went into Iraq to solve. As is so clearly demonstrated by daily events in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, in a tyranny people turn toward that facet of life left free; in the Muslim world that means radical Islam, as the only people who consistently try to change a painfully ineffective social set up. You think the Islamists/jihadis are bad now? Imagine how they'll metasticize if our experiment in a democratic civil society is thrown over for just more of what doesn't work, if the Islamists can crow that they really did defeat the well-armed but demonstrably decadent American bogyman. And at home we'll have demonstrated that the Arabs, at least, and arguably all of the Muslim world, are not capable of being civilized, with all that implies. To extend the metaphor, cancers are excised by surgery, then the body bombarded with chemical and/or radiation therapy until the doctors are certain every last cancerous cell had been destroyed. Else the cancer eats up the body until it accomplishes a painful death of the host. Dave D. described the options much more succinctly, but I haven't the link here.
Personally, I don't care if Iraq ends up one nation or three and I don't think preserving such artificial boundaries matters more than allowing viable societies to develop that can live with the rest of the world. |