Originally posted by: NeoV
"In a city where raw waste often spills from an antique sewer system, power goes off hourly, a postal service does not exist and public transport has long been a fantasy"
Ideas are one thing, implementation is another.
I'm not sure I would have had a problem with us going into Iraq had we said the goal was to make the lives of the people of Iraq better since Saddam and his boys were total asshats - and I wouldn't have a problem with us - along with support from other countries, doing that in several different countries - African nations included.
However, we came up with a big pile of BS as to why we were going into Iraq - you can't look back now and say "well look how much better off they are" - for one thing, I'm not entirely sure that's accurate yet, and it's not the reason we went there in the first place - remember "we are not nation builders".
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At least NeoV has a clue on a good part of the reason GWB&co failed. Gulf war one and indiscriminate bombing really decimated Iraqi infrastructure. The Iraqis became very good at cobbling together what little that remained, because the subsequent embargo made rebuilding impossible.
But during the build up to the war, I vividly remember all those GWB&co promises to rebuild things like electrical generation and sewage treatment. And GWB&co. supposedly committed some 80 billion for rebuilding. After all, it was not tip top secret that Iraqi infrastructure was in terrible shape.
Sadly, when we initially invaded, all the Iraqis who knew how to keep existing infrastructure running got fired in debathification, those few US people who knew their ass from a whole in the ground about the workings of a sewage or electrical grid simply said existing Iraqi infrastructure was hopeless, order all new parts, which put off getting anything for at least a year. By then, its easy to understand why millions of Iraqis became disenchanted with US, and formed into insurgencies
which then made rebuilding impossible.
And here we are, close to six years later, and its not clear if Iraqi infrastructure is even up to 2/2003 levels yet.
And for a war that was supposed to remove Saddam, therefore making life better for Iraqis, has turned into a Iraqi nightmare. And ask almost any Iraqi, their prevailing answer is that the US occupation has made their life decidedly worse.
And we in the US wonder why the Iraqis want us gone?