--- Dave Land <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Apr 7, 2005, at 3:01 PM, Gautam Mukunda wrote: > Substantial long-term support for the internal > opposition > to Hussein would have been a third say: neither > "going to > war" nor "leaving him in power." At the very least, > we > would have avoided being seen and opposed as > occupiers, > and at the best, we might have been credited with > having > "uplifted" the Iraqis. > > Dave
What internal opposition? I don't know what the figure for Iraq was, but I can tell you that in East Germany (a far less violent state, in day-to-day affairs, than Saddam's Iraq) _one-third of the population_ was informing for the Stasi. Every person of any significance in Saddam's Iraq was regularly approached by secret police operatives trying to get them to agree to oppose the regime. Saddam Hussein ran a totalitarian regime modeled on Stalin's Russia. If you posed any threat to the regime, you were monitored, imprisoned, or (most often) just killed. We saw in 1991 what happened to people who tried to revolt against Saddam. What do you think are the odds that anyone in Iraq was going to try that again? Gautam Mukunda [EMAIL PROTECTED] "Freedom is not free" http://www.mukunda.blogspot.com __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Read only the mail you want - Yahoo! Mail SpamGuard. http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
