sirenianshores

From CNN:

Bush said the government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki is fulfilling its commitment to increase troops and security in Baghdad.

In his first news conference in two months, Bush said Iraqi insurgents will do all they can to “undermine the Maliki government and its Baghdad security plan.”

“These are people that will kill innocent men, women and children to achieve their objective, which is to discourage the Iraqi people, to foment sectarian violence — and to, frankly, discourage us from helping” the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki do its job, Bush said.
President Bush said insurgents are also trying hard to turn American public opinion against the war.

“They’re all aimed at, frankly, causing people here in America to say it’s not worth it,” Bush said of insurgent attacks. But he said the violence will be much worse if the U.S. abandons Iraq now.

“If you think the violence is bad now, imagine what it would look like if we don’t help them secure the city, the capital city of Baghdad,” he said.

Bush’s rhetoric in this case is nothing more than cheap emotional blackmail designed to appeal to naive and fearful Americans. At this point in time, the American presence in Iraq is part of the problem, not the solution.

Many Americans are well-intentioned and believe that exporting their way of life benefits themselves and the rest of the world.

However, blundering into a place like the Middle East and trying to Americanise it (which in effect is what they are trying to do in Iraq) is a highly destructive form of utopian idealism. It would be like the people of the Middle East trying to enforce their Islamic way of life on us.

Naturally, any bunch of foreign invaders trying to do this would suffer the consequences of a predictable backlash.

Now if you add to the equation all sorts of ethnic and religious conflicts which are going on in Iraq, then you’ve got a perfect recipe for failure before you even begin.

Most Americans were not even aware of the conflict between Shia and Sunni Moslems before they went into Iraq. If they had, they probably wouldn’t have fallen for Bush’s empty rhetoric in the first place.