Monday's Chicago Tribune ran a column captioned "We gave Iraq freedom, not a civil war" by Charles Krauthammer. The same article ran in his home paper the Washington Post under the headline "Who's to blame for the killing". The full diatribe can be found at http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
I won't quote the whole article but one line of reasoning by Krauthammer is just so outrageous that I wanted to respond:
"America comes and liberates them from the tyrant who kept everyone living in fear, and the ancient animosities and more recent resentments begin to play themselves out to deadly effect." He then quotes Fareed Zakaria who said "we did not give them a republic we gave them a civil war." Krauthammer responds: "Of all the accounts of the current situation, this is the most stupid. And the most pernicious. Did Britain 'give' India the Hindu-Muslim war of 1947-48 that killed a million souls and ethnically cleansed 12 million more. . . . We gave them a civil war? Why? Because we failed to prevent it? Do the police in America have on their hands the blood of the 16,000 murders they failed to prevent last year?"
How can Krauthammer possibly claim that the US has no responsibility for the civil war in Iraq? We only went into Iraq uninvited and deposed their government for completely false and unjustified reasons. Then we eliminated their army, their police and their government after virtually all of the country's infrastructure had been looted, practically under our troops' noses, and then only supplied approximately 1/3 the number of troops it would take to keep the country under control. Is it any surprise that ethnic hatreds and tensions that go back centuries and were only supressed by Saddam's brutal methods just might get out of control in the environment we created in Iraq? Are the police in America to blame for the murders in their jurisdictions? No. But if Mexico invaded Texas and removed all of the police in its largest cities and did not sent enough troops to patrol the streets, wouldn't one think that just maybe Mexico would bear some responsibility if the murder rate in Texas suddenly spiked?
For Krauthammer to not only claim that we "gave Iraq freedom" but to then blame the outbreak of the civil war on the Iraqis, without taking into account the grotesque mishandling of the war by the Bush administration, is the real outrage.