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Allawi: "If this is not civil war, then God knows what civil war is"
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| St_Andrew |
| quote: | Iraq in civil war, says former PM
Iraq is in the middle of civil war, the country's former interim prime minister Iyad Allawi has told the BBC.
He said Iraq had not got to the point of no return, but if it fell apart sectarianism would spread abroad.
The UK and US have repeatedly denied Iraq is facing a civil war, but Mr Allawi suggested there was no other way to describe the sectarian violence.
Analysts say Mr Allawi's comments are part of political manoeuvring as talks continue over creation of a government.
UK Defence Secretary John Reid insisted that the terrorists were failing to drive Iraq into civil war.
Speaking to British troops in Basra, he said he thought the political and religious leaders had shown great restraint.
Those trying to turn one community on another were not succeeding, he added.
But there were reports of a mortar shell exploding in the southern city of Karbala as Shias gathered for one of the biggest events of their religious calendar. Police said there were no casualties.
The US-led Operation Swarmer, against insurgents and foreign fighters near Samarra, is now into its fourth day.
'No troop withdrawals'
There has been a cycle of sectarian reprisals and revenge killings between Sunnis and Shias.
The destruction of the Shia shrine at Samarra on 22 February made some observers wonder if the country was heading towards civil conflict.
The BBC News website's world affairs correspondent Paul Reynolds says the unrest is threatening hopes among the US and its allies for substantial troop withdrawals in the coming months.
And US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said that withdrawing US troops would be the modern day equivalent of handing post-war Germany back to the Nazis, and that "terrorists" would fill the vacuum.
'Sectarianism will spread'
Mr Allawi heads the Iraqi National List, a secular nationalist alliance made up of Sunnis and Shias.
Speaking on BBC TV's Sunday AM programme, he said it would be a mistake to underplay Iraq's problems, although the country was "edging towards" a political deal.
He said he had warned against creating a vacuum in the country and raised concerns about the insurgents and the dismantling of the military.
"It is unfortunate that we are in civil war. We are losing each day as an average 50 to 60 people throughout the country, if not more.
"If this is not civil war, then God knows what civil war is."
Mr Allawi added that a national unity government may not be "an immediate solution" to the country's problems.
Iraq is moving towards the "point of no return", he said, when the country would fragment.
"It will not only fall apart but sectarianism will spread throughout the region, and even Europe and the US will not be spared the violence that results...," he said.
There has been no official reaction so far to Mr Allawi's comments, but the general view of analysts and other Iraqi factions is that this is political manoeuvring by the former prime minister.
The BBC's Andrew North in Baghdad says that, although involved, his party list is not one of the key groups in the talks.
And one politician said he wanted to ensure that he is still being seen as a major player. |
Political game or not, the guy has got a point! |
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| shaolin_Z |
| If only this administration didn't have such contempt for democracy. |
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| hardcore trancer |
| Hey at least they are free and can vote.:rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: |
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| shaolin_Z |
| quote: | Originally posted by hardcore trancer
Hey at least they are free and can vote.:rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: |
Carefull, your eyeballs might fall out of their sockets from rolling so hard :p. |
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| hardcore trancer |
| quote: | Originally posted by shaolin_Z
Carefull, your eyeballs might fall out of their sockets from rolling so hard :p. |
ya I better watch out :p |
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| josh4 |
| quote: | THE IRAQ WAR: Three years
White House no longer sees quick end to difficult war
- James Sterngold, Chronicle Staff Writer
When the U.S.-led coalition attacked Iraq three years ago, the Bush administration was brimming with confidence that this would be a war only in the sense that a lot of bombs would be dropped and the military would seize, temporarily, a foreign capital. It was going to be swift, high-tech, clean.
Six weeks later, President Bush spoke in the past tense about Operation Iraqi Freedom, thanking the Iraqis who welcomed the U.S. troops and promising that democratic change would sweep the region.
Now, with sectarian violence roaring and casualties rising, the White House increasingly is talking, in the present tense, about a long war, meaning the old-fashioned kind -- "the crucible with the blood and the dust and the gore," as Gen. Richard Myers, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said last fall.
Three years on, experts from the left and the right say, the costly Iraq war has barely begun, and if there are to be broad benefits, as the president still promises, they could be years away.
William Odom, a retired lieutenant general who ran Army intelligence and later the National Security Agency during the Reagan administration, has called the Iraqi adventure "the greatest strategic disaster in our history."
"What we've learned is that you cannot impose a Pax Americana solution," said Conrad Crane, a Middle East expert at the Army War College who is leading a crash rewriting of the military's counterinsurgency manual in response to the unanticipated tenacity of the resistance. "You are not going to have a Western-style democracy, and you're not going to have a market economy."
David Mack, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Arab Emirates and one of the organizers of a pre-war State Department study on how to rebuild Iraq, which he says was largely ignored by the administration, said victory now may mean little more than avoiding the worst.
"Americans would like to think that for all we've done, we should have gotten something really good for our efforts," he said. "We just have to accept that we are not going be happy with the outcome. In fact, nobody over there in the region is viewing any of this as being positive."
Mack added, "Did I imagine when we went in things would become this bad? No, I never envisioned we'd have this disaster."
So far, American taxpayers have spent about $320 billion, a figure that is rising at about $7 billion a month, if the costs of Afghanistan are included.
Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz co-wrote a study earlier this year that estimated the real long-term costs to the U.S. economy, due to everything from higher oil prices and the long-term care of grievously wounded soldiers to interest payments on the expanding national debt, at more than $1 trillion if the war continues, and nobody doubts that that will be the case.
Americans will have to ratchet down their expectations about what the war in Iraq can achieve, the experts generally agree, and they must understand that failure -- in the form of a catastrophic descent into civil war, with broad political and economic implications -- is a prospect that the country must be prepared for.
This is, said Frederick Kagan, a conservative scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington and a strong proponent of the war, "the first stage of the first stage of the first stage."
He said he tempers his optimism with realism. "This may be what failure looks like," Kagan conceded. "But it may also be what success looks like. If we're going to succeed, it's going to look bad for a while."
Added Crane, co-author of two prescient studies for the Army War College predicting the fiery insurgency and the descent toward civil war, "I would argue that this is where we should have expected to be. Somehow we thought things would be different, that it would be a 'virtual war.' We've been jolted back to reality. Because our expectations were so high, it's much harder to adapt now to what's happening."
James Phillips, a national security expert at the Heritage Foundation, said Iraq is potentially far worse than the bruising U.S. experience in Vietnam.
Failure, he argued, would not just mean the creation of an unfriendly government, as happened in Vietnam, or even a breakup of Iraq, but a potential safe haven from which terrorists could attack around the globe and threaten two-thirds of global oil supplies.
"If we lose Iraq, we lose the war on terrorism," Phillips said.
He contends that the United States has no choice but to stay the course, as Bush has urged.
Even if the U.S. military campaign eventually succeeds, he said, "It's going to be generations for the things we said we wanted -- democratic institutions -- to spread around the Middle East."
Some experts say that the problem is not just the peril of civil war in Iraq, or the prospect that the unrest among Muslim sects might spread more widely in the region, but that the Bush administration raised expectations so high three years ago that the current difficulties look that much worse by comparison.
On Monday, Bush gave a major Iraq speech notable for its contrast between the heady promises of March 2003 and the realities of March 2006. He acknowledged that the military is fixing what hasn't worked in the effort to quell raging sectarian strife, and that Iraqi security forces that had been expected to relieve U.S. troops were performing poorly in some instances, particularly in the tumultuous streets of Baghdad.
While he repeated his broader goals of spreading democracy and insisted the United States would not flinch, he also hit a humbler note.
"I wish I could tell you that the violence is waning and that the road ahead will be smooth," Bush said. "It will not. There will be more tough fighting and more days of struggle, and we will see more images of chaos and carnage in the days and months to come."
E-mail James Sterngold at [email protected].
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URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.c...MNG3SHQOCR1.DTL |
So what now? I think when the Former Prime Minister starts declaring civil war, you know there is a problem. As usual, Bush hasn't changed his message urging everyone to stay the course. Might have worked at first but it looses emphasis every time its said. With Bush's popularity at its lowest ever, we're very well facing a pulling out of Iraq.
I didn't before and still don't think its a good idea to leave. Regardless how we got there, we're there. Something needs to be done and the problem is this Administration is not evolving their tactics to deal with the situation. If we leave now there will be no hope and the whole region could face decending into anarchy. When that happens there will be no choice but for the entire international community to become directly involved or face dire consequences. |
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| Kapedan |
| quote: | Originally posted by hardcore trancer
Hey at least they are free and can vote.:rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: |
Yeah, and they dont have to worry about getting killed by Saddam just because he felt like the people should be killed, but I guess you like that, and you dont like the right to vote and being free, oh wait, why are you living in Canada? |
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| hardcore trancer |
| quote: | Originally posted by Kapedan
Yeah, and they dont have to worry about getting killed by Saddam just because he felt like the people should be killed, but I guess you like that, and you dont like the right to vote and being free, oh wait, why are you living in Canada? |
here we go again with "Saddam was a bad leader" argument :o
look we know he was bad,but never once in his time there was a terrorist attack in his own country and no in civil war.He was bad but he had the whole country under control. |
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| Kapedan |
| quote: | Originally posted by hardcore trancer
here we go again with "Saddam was a bad leader" argument :o
look we know he was bad,but never once in his time there was a terrorist attack in his own country and no in civil war.He was bad but he had the whole country under control. |
Sure..people died. Hitler was bad but he had Germany under control, Stalin was bad but he had the country under control, dont give me this crap man, your in Canada, why are you living there or what? for a better life. |
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| hardcore trancer |
| quote: | Originally posted by Kapedan
Sure..people died. Hitler was bad but he had Germany under control, Stalin was bad but he had the country under control, dont give me this crap man, your in Canada, why are you living there or what? for a better life. |
Fact is Iraq is in a very bad condition,people are suffering,they have no clean water,no electricity.This is a oil rich country.They dont deserve this and the invasion was the worst thing that could happen to them.
Stop being so blind and look whats really happening there.These people are suffering more then they did before all because Americans want to force their way of democracy to these people.well I have news for you democracy doesnt always work at some parts of the world believe it or not. |
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| Cyrus King |
| quote: | Originally posted by hardcore trancer
Fact is Iraq is in a very bad condition,people are suffering,they have no clean water,no electricity.This is a oil rich country.They dont deserve this and the invasion was the worst thing that could happen to them.
Stop being so blind and look whats really happening there.These people are suffering more then they did before all because Americans want to force their way of democracy to these people.well I have news for you democracy doesnt always work at some parts of the world believe it or not. |
also.. you cant FORCE a democracy on a people.. that is what the americans dont realize. They are stupid.. |
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| Cyrus King |
| quote: | Originally posted by Kapedan
Sure..people died. Hitler was bad but he had Germany under control, Stalin was bad but he had the country under control, dont give me this crap man, your in Canada, why are you living there or what? for a better life. |
Hey.. what the woudl you do if the islamic world gathered their forces and attacked america becuase a terrorist (BUSH) was the leader of your country.. then they FORCED you guys with their weapons to follow what they thought was right? |
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