A Democratic Iraq?

Americans, most of whom do not think about anyonelse or anything else until some event forces them to, did not understand the socioeconomic ideology that drove the Vietnamese Communist; now they do not understand the socioreligious ideology that drives the radical Muslims. We blunder around the world trampling on people's toes and ideas while wondering the whole time why they are irritated with us instead of being thankful. When are we going to make an effort to understand the driving force behind the people with whom we intend to have a conflict?

I have lived in the Middle East and studied their culture and religion; so, I understand a little about the problems we are having now and will continue to have in the future. The foundation of the problem is that European and Western countries have a basic, almost intrinsic, understanding of the differences between the roles of law and religion in a society. Our law and our religion are held in two separate hands. We have this understanding because we inherited the concept from the Romans. For Muslims; however, the idea of law came from their religion and for them law and religion are held in one hand. Their law and religion comes from the Qur'an. We have separate and independent political leaders, judicial leaders, education leaders, and religious leaders; Muslims have clerics who control everything. The clerics are the political, judicial, religious, and education leaders who teach and control young Muslim minds from birth to death. Muslims raised under this system have no concept of self determination; they think and are what their clerics tell them to think and be.

To try and introduce and develop the concept of separate social compartments for these ideas in a short period of time will be just about as successful as trying to separate Siamese twins with a chain saw.

The Five Things We Did Wrong in Iraq

Article written in July of 2003

We did at least five things wrong in Iraq within the first 30 days that has extended the length and cost of the war in both American lives and money. Some of the errors made actually broke rules we learned during the Second World War.

First, in an effort to save money, we did not deploy Military Police to follow up behind our combat troops. Combat troops sweep through an area destroying enemy positions and much, if not all infrastructure (i.e., police, local government, and local emergency services). If the military police do not follow along behind the combat troops and establish law and order - chaos develops and people loot everything as they did in Iraq. They looted city hospitals, fire stations, police stations, museums and anything else that pleased them; no one stood in their way.

Second, Our biggest and most disastrous error was not securing the storage areas for weapons and explosives after they had been captured from the Iraqi army, also a job for Military Police. We just walked away from them.  Later, all of the weapons and ammunition that we allowed disgruntled Iraqis to loot was used to kill our soldiers.

Third, we disbanded a perfectly good Iraqi army; thereby creating an irritated pool of out-of-work men who can no longer support their families; men who were already trained in the art of war and knew how to kill us. The Iraqi army was not loyal to Sadam; the only loyalty he ever got was from his Republican Guard. The standard grunt in the army would have been loyal to who ever paid his salary; and that brings me to the forth mistake.

Forth, we told the Iraq army that we were going to pay them their back pay. I thought that was a good idea since we had needlessly forced them out of a job. Then what did we do? We stalled, we waited, and we argued over the procedure for weeks and weeks, further irritating the growing pool of angry soldiers, pushing them further and further away from us and closer and closer to the terrorist recruiters who were offering them a job and money.

Fifth, we allowed - and still are allowing - the Iraqis to shoot at us from mosques with impunity, we allowed them to run and hide in mosques without pursuing them.

We pulled this same crap in Vietnam; you can't have an untouchable sanctuary or an "I'm home free" zone like a child's game, when you are at war.

We should have totally destroyed the first mosque they tried that with and then warned them "if you don't want your mosques damaged or destroyed, don't use them as a military position." We need to adopt and make known the tactic that "if we take fire from a position, we will attack and destroy that position", end of story.

No building is as sacred as a soldier's life.