we have opened Pandora's box in Iraq

[Ibtisam]

some people need to respond to idoits like him, his comments lauding Israel make me so mad :mad:

 

Yes, we have opened Pandora's box in Iraq - but freedom has sprung free Gerard Baker

 

 

ON BOTH SIDES of the Atlantic, the Stop The War cries are deafening now. Fold the tents; cut the losses; bring them home.

Some of the pleading comes from people whose motives are purely mischievous. These are the critics who opposed the war in the first place and would like nothing more than to see it end in a humiliating climbdown for its authors. Their concern for the Iraqi people or the lives of British and American troops flows in rivers of crocodile tears; their true emotions will be realised in the warm thrill of self-vindication at the spectacle of coalition tank columns rolling, turrets forlornly down, out of Mesopotamia.

 

 

You know exactly what these people would say in the unlikely event they got their way. They wouldn’t hail the US and British decision to leave Iraq as the long-delayed but correct decision. It would instead be used as an opportunity to pour scorn on the whole project, to chortle at the hopeless vanity of the Bush and Blair crowd.

 

But there are many more good, honourable people who have come to the same conclusion not out of a desire for self-justification but because, whether they supported the war in the first place or not, they have come to see it as unwinnable, or at least they believe the situation so dire that the price — in further blood and treasure — is simply not worth paying. For them the genuine humiliation of retreat is worth suffering if it spares us all greater losses by staying.....

 

from todays times; read whole article

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,19269-1900190,00.html

[N.O.R.F]

Without reading the whole areticle but just the bit above, i must say he has apoint. No many of the journalists wishing for an end of occupation in Iraq are doing so due to the endless killing of innocents, the safe being of the people of Iraq, the mess the country is in or for the British troops to come home safely. Many of them are hoping for a pull (having opposed the war in the first place) just to be able to humiliate the govnt and the pro-war media.

 

one can understand why The Times would write such an article as their rivals (The Independent/The Mirror) are all for troop pull out. But it does make one question their motives.

[Ibtisam]

i think his conclusion pretty much sum's it all up;

"We have, surely, unleashed a violent fury of terrorism and guerrilla war that has a broader reach than Iraq or even the Middle East. But we have also unleashed the great virtue that in time will conquer these vices — not hope this time, though we could use some of that, but freedom. It would be a tragic mistake to cut our losses now, long before we have ensured that the virtue triumphs over the vices."

but this is not what i have a problem with, rather the uderlining message that the whole article follows. for example

 

In Israel, the one people in the region for whom freedom is no novelty, will go to the polls early next year. It looks likely that they will give a new mandate to Ariel Sharon to pursue his unlikely mission of unilaterally settling with the Palestinians.

 

This, the same Sharon who has been demonised by the same critics of the Iraq war, especially in Europe, is breaking the mould, not only in his own nation, but in the region too. He will push ahead, it seems, with a bold strategy in the teeth of fierce irredentism from the Right, that could result in a Palestinian state on more than 90 per cent of the West Bank and the whole of Gaza, perhaps even with a part of Jerusalem as its capital.

:cool: