Did anyone catch Prince Turki al-Faisal's (Saudi ambassador to the US) question and answer session from Monday? I caught a re-run of it this morning on C-SPAN. I missed the first few minutes, I think he was here for an energy council conference but I am not positive.
Anyways, while pulling out my materials to work on my midterm (my prof is a sadist and issued it Friday at 7pm and made it due Sunday at 7pm) I started listening to him speak. One question that he answered was on the state of Iraq, and what if any assistance they were providing the US and if he could speak about it some.
His answer was interesting to me, considering many majority Muslim nations are not fond of US involvement in the Middle East. I know Saudi Arabia has to try and balance between running their nation under the rules of Islam as well as meet the "rules of engagement" with the rest of the world. Tangent - sorry.
His initial statement was,"Since the United States came uninvited to Iraq, they must not leave uninvited." This is the thought process that I have had all along. Not so much the uninvited part, but more that we shouldn't leave Iraq a mess, but should leave when the Iraqi government is stable and able to ask us to leave, letting them run their country on their own.
The second part of the question al-Faisal was asked was in relation to a strategy I had not heard before (I could be under a rock but 'eh I heard it now). There is talk of separating Iraq into three different autonomous provinces or states. Prince al-Faisal said that in reality this was a poor idea. Because Iraq is not homogeneous, Sunnis are mixed with Shi'ite and Kurds it would be detrimental to the people. Prince al-Faisal feels that this form of separation would cause ethnic cleansing and the forcing of peoples to uproot their entire life, giving up all to move into their "settled" region. I think he brings up a good point, a really good one. In fact what comes to mind for me on this is the Jewish ghettos set up during WWII by the Nazis.
I know there is no simple, easy to implement plan to establish a stable government in Iraq, but we meaning the U.S. needs to stick it out, keep going and help the Iraqis to make it happen.
1 comment:
At least it wasn't a holiday weekend. :)
I agree. We need to stick it out and make Iraq stable before "we" (being our loved ones who go into harms way to support freedoms)withdraw. Hard to hear sometimes because it means that we will have to send our men and women back into harms way, often before they have recovered from the last round.
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