Iraqi barbarity - are these savages worth saving?
Anna Marshall - 14 April 2004
The civilised world was shocked last week at images of
the burning and desecration of the bodies of four American
civilians by jeering, barbaric Iraqi Muslims in Fallujah.
We have to ask whether it is worth the sacrifice of
coalition soldiers and civilians to help a group of
religious fanatics who appear stuck in a medieval time warp.
The new trend among left-wing journalists is to
refer to Iraq as America's Vietnam. Australia's opposition
leader, Mark Latham jumped on the bandwagon by also
declaring the analogy with Vietnam and promising that if the
Labor Party won power at the next election, he would pull
Australian troops out of Iraq by Christmas.
What a wonderful signal to send the terrorists. Can
Australia now expect Madrid-style bombings in the days
before the election?
Latham and the rest of the anti-Americans are wrong in the Vietnam
analogy. If pressure from the left-wing media forces an
early withdrawal of coalition forces, it will not be
America's Vietnam, it will be the world's Rwanda.
Modern Iraq was invented by the British after World War I.
In 1921 the then British colonial secretary, Winston
Churchill, was responsible for creating Jordan and Iraq and
for placing the Hashemite rulers, Abdullah and Feisal on
their respective thrones in Amman and Baghdad. Unfortunately
Churchill enclosed three warring groups, the Sunni Muslims,
the Shia Muslims and the Kurds
within the boundaries of Iraq. He wanted to create a
separate political entity, Kurdistan, but allowed himself to
be overruled by the officials of the colonial office.
If Iraq is left without security then
centuries-old hatreds will boil over and we may well see
genocide on the scale of Rwanda.
Perhaps the only solution is to partition Iraq into three
separate countries to separately accommodate the Sunnis, the Shiites
and the Kurds.
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