Top Ten Reasons the US should Stay out of Iraq and put Conditions on Arms Sales

http://www.juancole.com/2013/10/reasons-should-conditions.html



Top Ten Reasons the US should Stay out of Iraq and put Conditions on Arms Sales
Posted on 10/31/2013 by Juan Cole

1. The US caused the civil war and guerrilla war in the first place, and can’t fix it now. If both kinds of war could get started when the country was under US occupation, with as many as 160,000 troops in country, why would things be different? Under US rule, sometimes 3,000 Iraqi civilians were dying a month. why does anyone think a small force of US troops could make a difference at the moment? Moreover, the Iraqi parliament would never agree to any significant number of US troops on Iraqi soil, and nor would it offer them immunity from prosecution in Iraqi courts for war crimes. Therefore, Washington is not sending combat troops back in and Iraq would not accept them. Someone to train pilots in flying Black Hawks is a different matter.

2. The insurgency in Iraq is brutal and heart-breaking, but it isn’t unique in the world. Just last year, over 18,000 Mexicans died in their drug war through November 2012! It is estimated that so far in 2013 about 7,000 Iraqis have died in political violence. No one is suggesting that US troops should go into Mexico or that they would be effective if they did. Why this fixation on American intervention in the Middle East? (Mexico also has oil, so that isn’t the difference). Maybe it is just that Mexico is a relatively strong country with the world’s 14th largest gross domestic product and a population of 112 million. In contrast, Iraq is a small country of 32 million with the world’s 46th largest gdp, so maybe hawks in Washington think it can still be pushed around.

3. The US is still militarily occupying Afghanistan, and it had over 8,000 fatalities in 2012! (Iraq’s 2012 total civilian fatalities in political violence were about 4,500). If that is the best Washington can do when they are running the place, how likely is it they can be effective with a small force from the outside?

~snip~

9. If the US is going to give weapons to al-Maliki, it must put in place conditions and monitoring to ensure that they don’t end up going to al-Maliki’s de facto ally, the Syrian regime. The ability of Washington to undermine its own policies is mind-boggling.