This was previously posted on www.anton-wahlman.com on or before 2007-01-28:
From the most right-wing Republicans to the most left-wing Democrats, there appears to be a common theme in terms of wanting to avoid “chaos” in Iraq. By this, people tend to mean civil war between Shia and Sunni muslims, dragging Iran, Saudi Arabia and Syria into a larger regional war, and so forth. This is supposed to be a terrible thing, something we must prevent at all cost.
Wait a minute! Not so fast. What’s so wrong with a little bit of chaos – or civil war, or outright war, between various muslim factions in and around Iraq?
Let’s first review some history. We went to war in 2003 to finish the job 12 years after we chickened out in 1991. After we kicked him out of Kuwait, Saddam was on the ropes, ready for the plucking. The Iraqi army surrendered to Italian television crews and prayed for the US to come liberate them. We were indeed greeted as liberators. However, Colin Powell and Jim Baker advised George Bush-the-older that going all the way to Baghdad would somehow be unnecessary, too difficult.
So what did we get? Well, we got the opposite of chaos. We got stability. Saddam was stable in the saddle in Baghdad, left free to let his extremely brutal police state conceal all sorts of activity, including paying for suicide bombers to attack Israeli shopping malls and serve as host to terrorists on the run from the US military.
This stability was no good. There have been lots of stable regimes who are not good. Hitler’s regime was stable. Tojo was stable. The Soviet Union was stable for 70 years. Castro alone has been stable for a whopping 48 years. North Korea has been stable for 54 years. All of those regimes were at some point very stable, and all of those regimes were at some point lethal threats to the US, and needed to be removed or neutralized.
9/11 happened while there was relative stability in the Middle East. The Saudi regime, which fed most of the hijackers, has been stable since the 1920s. Extremely wealthy and not particularly in love with the US people, this could be characterized as a very lethal regime if you are an American, especially if you happened to be sitting on a high floor in The World Trade Center on 9/11.
So much for the need for a stable Middle East!
No, what we need instead is a lot of chaos and civil war in the Middle East, especially in and around Iraq. There are several key reasons why we haven’t been attacked here at home after 9/11, something which everyone (including me) thought impossible in the days and weeks following 9/11. One such key reason is because we have created a mess in Iraq. If we had actually “succeeded” in Iraq, bringing about some sort of functioning democracy, squashed the violence, etc., then the bad guys would have left Iraq and now be on their way to blowing up The Empire State building and the US Congress. The bad guys need to be kept busy in Iraq, not in Brooklyn.
For the US, chaos in Iraq is nothing to fear. To the contrary! What we want is a massive civil war in Iraq, which will hopefully spread to almost all of their neighboring countries – particularly Saudi Arabia, Iran and Syria. The bloodier the better. This will keep the religious nutcases really busy for a long time – hopefully long enough for me to live in peace and freedom until I am 100 here in the civilized world, or until the religious nutcases have erased themselves off the map to the last man, whichever comes first.
Think about it, what they are arguing about in this so-called “sectarian violence” or “civil war”: They are arguing about what happened to Mohammed, or who came after him, or something like that – whatever – 5,000 years ago. Or some time a really long time ago anyway. If that’s what those jokers are arguing about and killing each other about, I say: Good riddance! People who argue about useless fantasies and religious BS of that nature are not positive to the human gene pool. So let them fight with each other. To hell with stability; long live chaos and civil war in and around Iraq.
The sole root of all Middle Eastern conflict is found in religion. Sunni Moslems hate the Shia and vice versa. And some or most Moslems hate the West and the Israelis because we are not some form of Moslem. None of these problems will ever end until people stop taking religion seriously, or become outright atheists, which is the logical and rational conclusion anyway. In this context I don’t see why the rest of us should be particularly concerned about chaos and civil war in and around Iraq.
One wonders if this isn’t actually fully understood by our political leadership already, but that they are too afraid of pointing it out in public. It may not pass the politically correct test in the French-dominated culture of the diplomatic corps. One can’t help but wonder if Dick Cheney is the guy who has understood most of this all along. After all, he is the guy who was part of the team who took the decision in Spring 1991 to not depose Saddam, and was given the opportunity to correct that mistake of 1991. In other words, he is the only one left who learned from the key mistake of 1991: favoring Middle East stability over chaos and war. However, just like everyone else, he doesn’t dare to say it that way, but rather plays along with the same refrain of everyone from right to left, that we somehow need to prevent chaos and civil war in Iraq and beyond. It should come as no surprise that the politically correct premise is, as is typical, completely the opposite of the truth.
