State of emergency declared in Baghdad as protesters take Iraqi parliament | Hacker News Reader

State of emergency declared in Baghdad as protesters take Iraqi parliament

washingtonpost.com

28 pointsdismal212 comments

General Colin Powell warned George Bush before the Iraq war, "You break it, you buy it..."

Two months before the invasion of Iraq, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell warned President Bush about the potential negative consequences of a war, citing what Mr. Powell privately called the ''you break it, you own it'' rule of military action, according to a new book.

''You're sure?'' Mr. Powell is quoted as asking Mr. Bush in the Oval Office on Jan. 13, 2003, as the president told him he had made the decision to go forward. ''You understand the consequences,'' he is said to have stated in a half-question. ''You know you're going to be owning this place?...''

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/17/world/the-struggle-for-ira...

Well the West bought it way before the US invasion of Iraq. After the WWI the Ottoman Empire didn't exit gracefully, but it was kill -9ed. Now people are in a quest for identity and peace, and they have to deal with vultures who want their petrol and gas and whatnot.

I don't think the US general public as really understood what war is, what the consequences are, or what it takes to win, since before Vietnam.

That was 2004. Now it becomes more and more clear that Iraq war made all the region into an unpredictable situation. We might believe the world leaders learned a lesson. Obama even took the case during election campaign as if he is different from Mr.Bush

But later he DID the almost same thing in Libya, which had the same ideology based motivation to bring down dictatorship and promote (pretend it was done by its OWN PEOPLE) democracy and universal human rights.

That's very dangerous and most people might not notice: Politician seems understand the situation in their talk, but their behavior shows the opposite.

Just imaging: an idiot is silly in most things but just extremely good at one thing: pretend to be very smart and can successfully deceive every body INCLUDING himself. He would have overwhelming advantage over another seems dummy but actually smart guy.

(Recently I've witness Obama behave the same delusional way again in a dialog with Charlie Rose. To most audience, Obama seems reasonable person and gave convincing reasoning but he was actually based on an illusion which happened to be shared by public. )

I think there is one extremely important takeaway from all of this:

> At the heart of the protesters demands is an end to the political quota system, which was put in place after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 and sees positions shared out between sects.

I am unfamiliar with the situation in Iraq, but the same shit was done onto Bosnia and Kosovo. Both quasi-countries with quasi-governments, dysfunctional to the core, their corrupt elites kept in power by central powers in the US and EU to perpetuate the geopolitical status quo. By doing so they artificially keep the population from progressing, economically as well as socially. Parliaments are turned into dysfunctional chessboards for every power but the local people.

It's pretty obvious that this 21st century type of state building isn't much different from classic colonialism. Some people involved might want only the best for the locals, but then again so did the colonialists in their perverse ways.

Countries simply cannot be build without self determination and democracy. Quotas and veto powers are inherently anti-democratic.

Countries can't be built.

If the US Embassy staff is still there, makes you wonder what's really going on.

I thought they were going to greet us with flowers?

It turns out there were grenades in those bouquets.

Well, the Kurds more or less did. If we had done EVERYTHING perfectly, we might have been able to get one of either the Sunnis or Shiites to de facto support our presence. But we didn't.

So, this is something I don't get when I hear American people (I assume you are?) discussing the invasion and then occupation of Iraq: why do you think there's any way that any Iraqi people would ever "support" it?

If some foreign power (er, the Martians?) invaded and occupied the USA, would any American ever truly support it? Would it make any difference if someone was Republican or Democratic, or whatever? Wouldn't patriotic duty demand that you oppose the occupation?

I'm Greek, we were occupied by the Germans in WWII. As in the rest of Europe, some people collaborated with the Axis forces, and we even had a puppet government put in place and all, but there was never one group of people who "supported" the Axis as a whole. We had home-grown fascists and communists who slaughtered each other once the Germans were gone, but they both fought the Germans (and each other) ferociously while we were occupied. Ordinary people resented and resisted the occupation, with all they had [1].

I can't understand how anyone may think any other people would do anything different, ever, no matter who was the occupying force and whatever the justification. Things can't get worse for a sovereign country and its people than having a foreign power occupying your territory [2].

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_Resistance (please ignore the weaselly-worded bit at the start)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axis_occupation_of_Greece

It's not unreasonable to think that the invasion could have been managed in such a way that most Iraqis (2 of the 3 primary groups) would see us as liberators. As it is, we only managed that with the Kurds.

The reason I think that is because the Saddam regime was based on oppressing the Kurds and Shiites, and elevating the Sunnis at their expense. In that kind of situation, you can pull the liberator thing off if done carefully.

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