Our record of arming Muslims in the Middle East and Central Asia hasn't been a good one. Arming the Shah, Saddam, the Afghanis, all have come back to bite us. Afghanistan was better off under the Commies!

The average, rank and file Bush supporter seems to detest all muslims and think that Arabs are backwards and that Islam is a "bloodthirsty" religion. So what leap of magical thinking makes these anti-Arab, anti-muslim bigots so confident that Iraqi Arab Muslims are suddenly capable of transcending everything they accuse them of and building a stable democracy?

Seriously, will one of you Arab-hating, Muslim-baiting con bigots please answer this one for me? Your logic still baffles me.

"Seriously, will one of you Arab-hating, Muslim-baiting con bigots please answer this one for me? Your logic still baffles me."

Well, you pathetic "ho," I support the war and the aspirations of the Iraqi people, and the only bigot here is you. But I'll try to answer.

You shouldn't be "baffled." After all, it was you who set up your own syllogism (false logic) and then demand someone defeat it.

First, you set up the straw man (The average, rank and file Bush supporter).

You imbue your straw man with projections that actually live in your own rotten heart (You seem to detest all muslims and think that Arabs are backwards and that Islam is a "bloodthirsty" religion.)

So what leap of magical thinking makes YOU, an anti-Arab, anti-muslim bigot so confident that Iraqi Arab Muslims are suddenly capable of transcending everything YOU accuse them of and building a stable democracy?

I don't know why you harbor that kind of ignorance but it doesn't take magical thinking to tell me what history has already proven.

How about the fact that the Babylonians were practicing law while your ancestors were still squatting in the dirt eating insects and dung balls. How about the fact that before the British Empire partitioned the place the Shiia and the Sunni seldom let their differences erupt into anything close to what we see today.

In spite of your ignorance and your racial prejudice toward Iraqis, they are capable of much more than you give them credit for.

"I support the war and the aspirations of the Iraqi people" -

What the hell does that mean? There isn't an Iraqi body politic - Iraq consists of several groups of people who have no actual desire to from a country together, when you get right down to it. Iraq was a fake country held together by a dictator. Get rid of the dictator and his party, the country dissolves into civil war. The "Iraqi" people should never have been forced into forming a nation in the first place. It would appear that they aspire to divide the country up into Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish regions. Does killing the dictator and unleashing civil war count towards supporting their aspirations? Was that the point of the war? Joe, do you know what kind of HELL we've unleashed over there with this war of yours? Exactly what actual outcome do you expect, and how will it have been worth the pain?

Iraq's broken. We don't need to keep breaking it. Leaving the mess we made ALONE for 200 -300 years is probably the most helpful thing we can do at this point. We caused a train wreck, and now we're trying to 'treat' the victims with trepanation when we should just let them die in peace. Some things, once broken, CANNOT BE FIXED. Reality is ugly like that sometimes...

Bush loves to talk about how Saddam killed thousands of his own people, meaning fellow Iraqis. That already shows his total ignorance of Iraq. When Saddam killed the Kurds he wasn't killing his own people. No more so than southern plantation owners were enslaving their own people when they kept slaves.

The people living in Iraq identify with family, clan, ehtnicity and religion. Iraqi nationalism is way at the bottem of the list. In the last election the non-sectarian parties received 10% of the vote.

My comment on slave owners was meant as a reflection of how they felt, not on the reality of a common humanity.

The issue, I think, is not one of racism or the belief that Iraqis are not civilized enough to appreciate democracy, its the fallacy in assuming the Iraqi people would embrace western style democracy as a superior form of government. The problem is not our prejudice against Iraqis, but our arrogant bias toward our way of government.

The government this administration sought to create in Iraq is what this administration assumed was the best government, as in our style of government with free market overtones; a neo-con utopia. However, the government created was alien to any government the Iraqis had lived under and without any foundation for them to believe it was the best form of government to live under.

No one ever bothered to ask why the founding fathers did not model the US government on the parliamentary system used by England, though that was the best democracy of the time. In many ways, it was likely that they didn't trust it, at least in its complete form, even if you replace king with president, and House of Lords with Senate.

The same may well apply in Iraq where a Sunni minority views the current democratically elected government is nothing more than a system designed to ensure Shiite dominance. The Shiites only respect the government to the extent it is a tool for furthering their own aims, which may be counterproductive to our concept of democracy; such as creating an Islamic state based upon Sharia Law. The Kurds trust the government we have imposed upon them only so long as it grants them tacit if not outright independence.

It may be that because this new governing model is both foreign, untested and untrusted, that so many disparate Iraqi factions are exercising their political rights with the gun and the explosive rather than the vote and the filibuster.

Let them all kill and plunder one another. Screw it. In 500 years they'll still be fighting each other for reasons they no longer care about or remember. So let's just back out and hope some dictator arises to do whatever it is dictators do best. With any luck it will give rise to an Arab Hugo Chavez and all the good and dear progressives love that guy. There is no such country called Iraq. There never has been. It was the creation of some British army officer waving his pointer over a map with zero regard for the people who lived there. So trying to synthetically hold together a bunch of armed squabbling hatefilled agitators is a complete waste of time. It is truly a job for the authoritarian hand of a new dictator. Democracy? Pfft....nonsense. You can have democratic anarchy or you have peaceful repression. Take your pick.