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"People get the government they deserve."--le Comte de Maistre

"As much as I admire VDH, I find this sentence obscene. It assumes something I reject totally: that the lives within a pathological, killer society are worth exactly the equivalent number of American lives."

Without going into the relative values of American versus Iraqi lives, I will point out that law and order wise, conditions in Iraq were much safer under Saddam than they are now.

Arab Muslim culture is a very primitive one compared to practically every other currently practiced today. Individuals have no sense of self. They are members of a tribe first, a religious sect second, a nation, a distant third.

They do not choose their own destiny as they belong to their father or their husband, and he in turn belongs to his chieftain or Mullah. As such they fulfill the tasks assigned to them and no more. Individual thought or rebellion is weeded out and punished. Life is lived on a smaller scale. There is no such thing as individual freedom or responsibility. Virtually everyone is a vassal to someone else and only the man at the top is truly free.

It used to be Saddam Hussein, now there will be a struggle to find out his successor but in the end, Islamic tribal culture will demand that there is one man rule once again. le Comte de Maistre was right, people do get the government they deserve. In Iraq's case, they want and deserve a brutal dictator. How else do you explain their behavior. A brutal dictator seems to be the only type of ruler that can maintain law and order in such a primitive society.

It will remain this way until Iraqi's give up Islamic tribal culture. In that respect, western music, movies, fashions, and businesses are probably more effective than troops. The troops aren't even attempting to make Iraqi's give up their religion.

will remain this way until Iraqi's give up Islamic tribal culture

Always find it amazing how Americans, who can hardly find the Middle East on the Map, are self proclaimed "experts" on how the Iraqis must live. Trying to tell people how they must live is IMPERIALISM. It doesn't work.

Pollyanna, is that you?????

See #35.