Despicable in the first order...

[A Black Falcon]

What I think should happen? That they keep things the way they are now, with about as much equality as you could hope for from a Middle Eastern country... but saying "it's okay to let them devolve and opress half of their population because our delusions make us think that it'll actually help bring the nation to peace and let us declare victory and flee" is just wrong. We shouldn't accept that... we can do more, and should be doing more. If we'd given a clear indication, both publically and privately, of what we wanted, I doubt this would have happened... but Bush doesn't truly care, so we didn't, so the Shi'ites (and it is the Shi'ites who are most interested in revoking women's rights) took the chance they were given and rolled them back decades. And what does the American government say? Essentially, "Oh well, pass it anyway!" Disgusting.

Look, a constitution won't fix Iraq... Bush was monumentally stupid to invade and now we're paying the price. Whether we'll pay the full price or do things haphazardly and uncaringly like we did in Afghanistan is still to be fully determined though...

Really, I don't see anything we really can do. By staying we incite violence, but by leaving we'd incite even more violence as the factions would be freed to go to war with eachother... so what do we do? Try to keep this artificial country in one piece? Let it break apart into Kurdistan (the Turks would be ... extremely displeased... with this development...), Iraq (Sunni), and the Islamic Republic of Southern Iraq (falling more and more under Iran's power every day)? ... I don't know, I just don't see anything we can do... it's a very bad situation. And yes, you can't force democracy on people who don't want it. And you can't force equal treatment at home. But you can equalize the laws and hope that with time things will get more fair... look at India -- the laws are equal, in reality the situation for the poorer classes is extremely unfair (both classwise and genderwise), but hopefully with time things will improve... in and Iraq where clerics control the government what chance does that have of happening?