Vince wrote: > Want regime change? End the sanctions. > > Flood Iraq with all the trade and cultural ties and > commerce and humanitarian assistance and everything that we > can.
I think that's a great idea but how does one get around Saddam to get it to them? Many countries have given them humanitarian aid and bought oil for food, etc., but all you see Saddam do with it is build more opulent palaces. What does go to help them does not seem to be reaching them. I had a long talk with an Iraqi exile here some years back. He was apoplectic in his opposition to Saddam but also wished that the sanctions would end because they were not hurting Saddam, but the people. > That is how the government of the USSR, Lithuania, Latvia, > Estonia, Poland, East Germany, Hungary, Czecholslovkia, > Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria and every eastern Eurpopean > people threw off Communist rule without recourse to war. Yes, but there were many decades where those people were executed, imprisoned or rolled over by tanks if they resisted. I think the advent of TV really helped made a difference in bringing down the Soviet empire. Despite the government's attempts at censorship and control, people were eventually able to get a view into the outside world. They could see the prosperity of much of the rest of the world and realized that they were being fed propaganda all those years that their system was somehow superior. The USSR at some point could not control its (mostly more industrious and prosperous) satellites, nor its own people. Remember toward the end the reports of no one going to work anymore and sitting around drinking vodka all day? Lech Walesa was a brave man and what he started eventually snowballed into mass resistance in the other countries. But it took a long time to evolve. > End the sanctions and swamp them with US goods, > humanitarian aid, commerce, and contacts. Be a friend, > not a bully. I'm all for it if we can find a way to bypass Saddam and his power structure. I'm no expert on Iraq, but do remember reading general interest/travel magazines/National Geographic stories over 20 years ago and way back before I believe Saddam went off the deep end. Maybe the stories I read were propaganda, but they did paint a picture of a thriving, modernized country with many educated people. How awful it must be for those Iraqi people who remember the times when life was normal and prosperous to then have been thrown backward into a sort of dark ages world. Kakki
