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If we are fighting for "A Democracy in Iraq," what is wrong with this picture?

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Botany Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Oct-18-07 08:12 AM
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If we are fighting for "A Democracy in Iraq," what is wrong with this picture?
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2007/10/22/071022taco_talk_wright?printable=true

The vast majority of Iraqis want us out, fact. So when * said yesterday that the goal of a
democratic Iraq was the objective of his Iraqi mission why are we still there?




As early as August of 2003, five months after the invasion, a Zogby poll found that two-thirds of Iraqis wanted the U.S. and British forces to leave the country within a year, and more than half said that the Iraqis should be left alone to set up their own government. Two years later, as Iraqis were about to vote in their first democratic election, two-thirds wanted the Coalition troops out either immediately or as soon as the new government was established. (The model that Iraqis most admired was that of the United Arab Emirates, a loose federation of seven tribal states, each overseen by a prince, and ruled by a president who is, essentially, a king.) In 2006, when the Iraqi government was in place, a poll by the University of Maryland found that seventy-one per cent of Iraqis wanted their government to ask the Americans to leave within a year; an even higher number doubted that the U.S. would comply with the request.

A poll released last month (by ABC News, the BBC, and the Japanese broadcaster NHK), half a year after the surge in American forces, found that nearly half of Iraqis favored an immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces, while thirty-four per cent of Iraqis, most of them Kurds, said that the U.S. should remain “until security is restored.” Among Shiites, forty-four per cent favored immediate withdrawal, and among Sunnis the figure reached seventy-two per cent—substantial increases in both cases. More Iraqis than ever—fifty-seven per cent—say that violence against American forces is acceptable, diminishing the prospect of order being restored as long as the occupation continues.
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