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Well, isn't that 40% more than in 2001 which to mark me is a marked improvement over 0% in 2001
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Put out the fecking bunting. It's not a free and fair representative democracy if only 40% of the country are allowed to vote. It's not free and fair representative democracy if you have to keep the position of polling stations secret, have a curfew, bring in thousands of foreign troops and shut the borders. It's a militaristic police state, which curiously enough it was before, although they had more electricity then.
Face it, large parts of the Iraqi population will be unrepresented in the new parliament, which, as all parliaments do, will be run by the majority for the majority, which in this case is Shias with strong links to Iran and extreme fear and loathing of the mad al-Qaeda end of Sunni Islam taking root at the other end of the country. These unrepresented Iraqis are, however, extremely well represented in the insurgent forces currently giving the Americans and the useless Iraqi security forces a hard time. So the election will not result in a democratic Iraq, it will result in polarisation and eventual civil war between those who have been undemocratically 'elected' and those who feel better represented by the men of violence than the alleged parliament. Remember the troubles in Northern Ireland started because of perceived (well, fairly obvious) disenfranchisement of the Catholics by the Protestants. You can add South Africa and the South of the USA to this, too, with their legacies of racial hatred and violence, fortunately they had men like Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela, but if someone of that calibre pops up in Iraq these days he'd probably be thrown into Guantanamo.
Partial democracies are no better than no democracy - while the latter leads to tyranny the former leads to civil war. Pick a demon.
Don't trot out the old 'it's foreign fighters' one, it's long discredited - obviously there are a few nuts who want a go at the Yanks, but the heady brew of Iraqi nationalism, religious tribalism and perceived forcible disenfranchisement is quite enough to get the Sunni hardmen out and fighting until the US ups and leaves. Of course Iraqi collaborators are targets, they always are in wars against occupation, they're less well guarded and obviously figures of extreme hatred by those opposed to the invasion. After all they *chose* to collaborate and fight their fellow countrymen. How would you feel about Brits fighting in Nazi uniform? There are innumerable examples throughout history.
The problem is of course that the US didn't expect to be fighting this war (few armies do, of course) and is thus unprepared. In that past (Korea for instance) it's taken a couple of years for the right leadership to float to the top, but in this case the intellectual weakness and vanity of the executive is preventing the men at the top from making any kind of sensible decisions.
And 'draw a line and move on' is the line trotted out by the very people who got us into the war in the first place on lies and illegal grounds, I don't accept their reasons for going to war so I'm certainly not going to accept their demands that we put our fingers in our ears and go 'la la la I'm not listening' like a spoiled toddler. Their crimes need to be kept under the spotlight until they pay for them.
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Terrorism did exist in Iraq before the war, it was called Saddam Hussain and his merry men.
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Well, if you're going to redefine terrorism to mean anything you want, please let the OED know so the rest of us can keep up with the English language. Anyway, you're confusing terrorism, which espouses political/cultural aims by means of violence, generally in small, focused groups, with unpleasant paranoid toughs who are willing to kill to get into power and willing to kill to stay in power. The difference with terrorists is that they aren't actually in power and aren't actually a threat to the existence of nations.
Seti is quite right to reiterate that 9/11 was nothing to do with Iraq - it was nothing to do with Iran* either, since that country is a Shia theocracy and one of al-Qaeda's aims is the elimination of Shias. Quite what attacking countries unconnected with al-Qaeda does to help fight al-Qaeda sponsored global terrorism I'd be interested to hear.
*Or North Korea, to complete the set