: re: The Conundrum of a Unified Iraq and a Unified Syria

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine
Date: Wed, Jun 18, 2014 at 1:20 PM
Subject: re: The Conundrum of a Unified Iraq and a Unified Syria
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

   As his neo-con fever subsides, Tom Friedman acknowledges that "the only way [Syria and Iraq] can remain united is if an international force comes in, evicts the dictators, uproots the extremists and builds consensual politics from the ground up — a generational project for which there are no volunteers. "

    We have real  data from such experiments. The U.S. built our own consensual politics from the ground up. By 1865, when we really had it running, it had taken us 89 years, and the deaths of 620,000 Americans ( 2% of our whole population).  More recently, we also installed a national government in Japan. That project cost us 106,000 American deaths, and we can't know the whole cost yet because our army of occupation is still there.

   So let's acknowledge that Rumsfeld and Cheney and Feith and Wolfowitz were wrong. No one--in either Syria or Iraq--is going to welcome us with flowers as liberators. Before we go in, we need to ask whether we have the right to commit our grandchildren to serving in the occupation there.
Barry Haskell Levine

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/18/opinion/thomas-friedman-the-conundrum-of-a-unified-iraq-and-a-unified-syria.html?hp&rref=opinion&_r=0