Dean's World

Good report. But maybe you ought to read down the page another paragraph or so.

The biggest problem for a stable Iraq is that it is a multinational state. Here in the United States, you can be an "American" and be white, black, oriental, latino, protestant, catholic, orthodox, jewish, muslim, buddhist, mormon, atheist, witchish, or what have you.

In Iraq, however, you were born a shi'a arab Muslim, a sun'a arab Muslim, or a sun'a kurdish Muslim. What you were born determines where you live, whom you marry, where and with whom you pray, where and how you are buried, and quite frequently, why you were murdered or allowed to live.

It's like the West Side Story, but the Jets and Sharks are armed with RPGs, Semtex and suicide bombers, and the locals not only want Officer Krupke to stay off their turf and go back where he came from, but they'll kill him right in his squad car if they get the chance.

You think you can easily ignore nationality and make one nation out of three. (In reality, for no other reason than that was the way the victors of World War I at the Versailles peace conference carved by the ottoman turkish provinces and created "Iraq". Just like these same Even the Canadians are finding that difficult and in the long run impossible, and there they are dealing with comparitively mild mannered Anglophones and Quebecois. For a more up to date example, go back and research former Jugoslavia, which is the way such places end up.

So good luck with the democracy project. But I think "democracy" has one meaning in an air-conditioned shopping mall in a midwestern American suburb, and an entirely different meaning in an arab shuk (marketplace) in the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI

I read more than a paragraph down--I read all of it. My entire point is that it's unjaundiced, unhyped look at the positives and negatives.

No one ever said the project would be easy. As I have said many times, if we just wind up with something that looks like Pakistan, that's still better than what we had. But it already looks like we're on track to do better than that.

As for what I think: I'll be the judge of that, thanks. Multi-ethnic and stable societies have existed many times and many places. The United States--which has always been multi-lingual, multi-ethnic, and full of racial and ethnic and religious tensions--is the best example, but there are others, not least of which are Canada, India, China, Japan, Belgium, and the United Kingdom.

No one--least of all me--ever said this would be a cakewalk.