If the US hadn't destroyed the central government, it might have been possible for the Iraqis, with a functioning state, to have negotiated a more equitable sharing of power and resources between the various sects.

If if if...

The point is, the US did destroy Iraq's central government. The US did meddle. The damage is done. The pot's broken.  And the US is now not a solution but a major part of the problem.

Immediate US withdrawal would mean...what, as far as Iraqis are concerned?  Bloodbaths, hordes of refugees, breakdowns of basic public services. Exactly the opposite of what they have now?

Immediate US withdrawal would probably mean de facto Iranian dominance over much of Iraq. Oil prices would zoom upwards to a permanently higher level. And this is supposed to be a bad thing?

After the end of the Cold War there was only one cogent reason for the US to play imperial politics in the Middle East. Cheap oil. George H. W. put it in thinly-veiled terms during Desert Storm: "the American Way of Life is not negotiable". By that he meant that American access to cheap oil is not negotiable.

Thirty years ago that much-maligned fellow Jimmy Carter proposed an alternative, but the American people didn't buy it. Now, with cheap oil due to fall victim to geological reality anyway, the sooner Americans begin to make the break towards genuine energy independence the better off they'll be. And there's no sharper incentive to do so than the magic of the marketplace--higher prices.

There might be less painful and more equitable ways of making this transition. Rationing, for example. But since many Americans have been brainwashed into believing that Big Government Doesn't Work--unlike WW2 when oddly enough it did work--they'll wind up doing it the old-fashioned way.

As Winston Churchill put it: "Americans always do the right thing, after they've tried everything else."

"That's funny. That plane's dustin' crops where there ain't no crops"

in Yugoslavia.  I saw a Michael Parenti video on Youtube called "Lies, War, and Empire" and he mentioned that a judge in his trial said there was no evidence Milosovich was committing genocide.  Then he conveniently died.  He wrote a book about it called "To Kill a Nation".  It is another example of going to war for humanitarian reasons and destroying the last vestiges of socialism because it was such a threat to capitalism.

Alexander is right. Remember, this war isn't fought on behalf of the people of Iraq, and not being fought on behalf of Americans, or the Western World. It is being fought on behalf of Big Oil. The whole oil revenue sharing law is about giving the oil companies control of the oil. Oil Oil Oil. Get it, people? Blood doesn't matter. Oil matters.

If you look at a map of what had been Yugoslavia as it is today it resembles the region as was dissected under the Nazis. The same geopolitical dynamics driving the Nazis in 1942 drive the Germans today. The problem was that the Nazis badly served their corporate masters, and in some ways presumed that they were more powerful than their corporate masters.

Ultimately the profit from oil is the most important thing in this war. If Iraq collapses and there is genocide it will be regrettable for Oil, but it is only important in how it affects the control of the resources. A fractured, weakened country? Easier for corporations to negotiate for the oil. Utter chaos making it impossible to extract the oil? Three dollars a gallon goes to five dollars a gallon. And when the Iraqi oil finally comes back online, under Oil's control, maybe it can be sold for ten dollars a gallon.

Did I mention OIL?

The USSR was a tyranny, too, like Yugoslavia and Iraq. And yet, when it fell apart, there was no bloodbath.

Does Chechnya ring a bell? In any event, the vital difference between the USSR and Yugoslavia or Iraq is that the USSR was always a Russian state, and when the USSR broke up, the Russians were (for the moment) content to keep Russia in one piece and let the other major ethnic states go without a fight. In Yugoslavia and Iraq, the ethnic and sectarian differences did not and never have fallen along the comparatively neat geographic boundaries that were present in the USSR.

I can't believe how smug people like you are. And you probably call yourself a progressive.

I'm not being smug, I'm being realistic. Just because we might wish for a happy ending in Iraq doesn't mean one is actually possible.

And no, I don't call myself a progressive. That's a label used by people who are too cowardly to stand up and be counted as liberals.

---Cthulhu for President: Why vote for the lesser evil?