How far broken is Iraq? I read all the various proposals to "solve" the problem, and my immediate reaction is, "Humpty Dumpty took a great fall; all the king's horses and all the king's men could not put him back together again".
Obviously there are limits to the broken egg analogy. A country--or a geographical region, if you will--is not a limited entity. There will be people, resources there. Culture, history, crime, poetry...the full extent of human effort and emotion. But it remains: what was there was smashed.
Whatever the future, the fate of Iraq was sealed in the very early days of the war. When the national library was looted and burned, when the national museum was looted and burned, when Donald Rumsfield said, "stuff happens", and equated anarchy with freedom, it was clear that no good would come of this. When the head of an intensely hierarchical, regimented organization cannot distinguish between freedom and anarchy, it is clear that the our leaders have slipped their moorings and drifted off into psychological waters whose divorce from reality knows know depth. When the inmates are in charge...
I don't know how broken Iraq is. I do know that any thoughts that it is "fixable" are hubris. It has become a cliche that there are no good choices but...there are no good choices. Given the folks who are in charge, I think that our government will continue to make the worst choices. It is the end of the world as we know it.
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