E-Mail This Article to a Friend What will it take? (continued)

Rabbi Michael Lerner, founder, Tikkun Community

The US should bring the troops home now, and allow the people of Iraq to determine their own future. There is no longer a military regime preventing people from creating a democratic and a human-rights-observing society. It seems perfectly plausible to me that people could work out that solution amongst themselves.

The United States and the rest of the world community should also support the option, if that option is chosen by the people of Iraq, of splitting that society into three separate states, to allow each ethnic group to have their own national self-determination. And then from that standpoint to work out what relationship each one of those ethnic groups wants to have, or what relationship those three states might want to have, as perhaps the first step in a united states of the Middle East.

Definitely the United States is doing more harm than good by its presence. The United States not only provides a visible target for anger at the incredible destruction that has happened in Iraq, as a result of the US intervention, but it also seeks to dominate parts of the economy and parts of the life of that society.

I’m in favor of a massive global Marshall Plan that would include Iraq, but not extended only to Iraq. It would certainly include the entire Middle East. It would have as its central guiding principal, the principal of generosity: that we want to eliminate poverty, homelessness, hunger, inadequate education, and inadequate health care for the peoples of the world, and we’re doing that because we know that it’s the most effective way to beat terrorism, and the most effective way to build security for the United States, but also we’re doing it because it’s right. It’s the morally right thing to do, the thing that is required of us by all the religious and spiritual traditions that 95 percent of the American public identify with.

The cost of a global Marshall Plan would not exceed the cost of continuing military involvement in Iraq, and it would provide a lot more security for us, and for the people of Iraq.

War does not bring out in people a sense of community and generosity. Instead, some of the most mean-spirited elements of society, those who believe that the best path in life is domination and control over others, are now crawling out of their holes and taking positions of power in our society. That leads to a general mean-spiritedness. You can see that every place, from the way in which people are forced to compete with each other to get adequate funds for schools for their children versus adequate funds for Alzheimer’s, from that grassroots level, all the way up to the current distasteful way that people in the Senate are acting. At every level you create division, anger, and frustration, and that plays out throughout the society.

I’m concerned that we may see the emergence of an Iraq filled with anger at the West. Whenever the United States gets out, we’re going to have a reaction of negativity against the West for the invasion and for the occupation. And the longer it goes on, the deeper the frustration and anger is going to be, and that will potentially manifest itself in an even more vitriolic policy toward Israel, and potential destructiveness toward Israel. There is also a growing danger of the people not only of that region but of the United States forming an anti-Semitic backlash against the Jews in Israel, for pushing for the war in Iraq, and now at least some pushing overtly for a war with Iran. I’m very worried about the potential anti-Semitic backlash that might accompany America’s continued presence in military form in Iraq.

G. Gordon Liddy, host, The G. Gordon Liddy Show

When the Iraqi government is able to fully control the situation within its borders itself, then of course there would be no need for us and we could go home. That depends on whether or not we can get control of the border.

The bulk of the people now attacking the Iraqi people are not Iraqis. It used to be that it was an awful lot of residual Baathists and what have you. But most of these are so-called foreign fighters or jihadists. The majority of them are from Saudi Arabia, they are infiltrating mostly from Syria, but also from Iran. That is a long, open border, and it’s difficult — I mean, we can’t even police ours with Mexico.

The training of the Iraqi troops is coming along a lot better, I understand, than the training of the Iraqi police. So I’d say that we’re making good progress with respect to their troops, we need to make better progress with respect to their police.

All human life is sacred. But I recall the air war over Europe: 80,000 dead. When the Marines took the island of Tarawa, six out of every 10, dead. The battle of the Hurtgen Forest, it was 30,000 dead. When you understand what war can cost, you realize how economically in terms of lives we are doing this.

Up until now, the only democratic government in the entire Middle East was Israel. Now we have another democratic government, which is Arab. This is a very good thing, and it is an example to people who say that Arabs absolutely cannot ever have a democracy. It is opposed by the other nations in the area, because they see it as the wave of the future, and that’s not their way, that of tyrannies and dictatorships and kingdoms.

The drumbeat of propaganda from the left is the mythology that we’re never going to be able to spread democracy in the Mideast, that it’s a fool’s errand. That’s not true. It flies in the face of what we have done in Iraq. It flies in the face of what we have done in Afghanistan. I see the left turning against Israel even, much to my astonishment.

If we bring the troops home now it will cause unmitigated disaster in the Mideast, and we won’t do it. The Iraqis are not able right now to sustain themselves against attacks that are coming from mainly outside their country. The democratic government might well fold, and that would be disastrous for democracy in the Middle East.

Franklin Fisher, professor emeritus, MIT Department of Economics

The Iraqi water system is in considerable disrepair, to put it mildly. Not just because of the war, but also because of what happened under the Saddam Hussein regime. The system badly needs repair.

Secondly, Iraq has been for many years one of the parties to a serious dispute over the waters of the Euphrates. The Euphrates rises in Turkey and flows through Syria, Iraq, and Iran. There’s a big fuss over the water. I am the head of an international project called the Water Economics Project, which is sponsored by the Dutch government and consists at the moment of Israelis, Palestinians, Jordanians, Americans, and Dutch, and we have developed methods for dealing with such disputes, and serious analysis of what should be done for infrastructure and water systems. A peaceful Iraq could certainly use that, and I think the US government ought to be planning what’s going to happen to the water system and how to resolve those disputes.

Under the current insurgency it’s going to be hard to repair anything. So far as I know — and I may not know — not much is being done in this regard.

Not dealing with the water system has to be bad for the agricultural situation, for one thing. There’s also the prospect of a continuing source of tension between Iraq and its neighbors for many years unless they can fix the water dispute.

There is also a big environmental problem, involving the drying up of the area where the marsh Arabs lived. There is an area in southern Iraq which was wetlands essentially, in which a large number of people known as the marsh Arabs used to live. They were not friends of Saddam, and Saddam managed to dry up the wetlands, causing considerable environmental damage to them, destroying the habitat of the marsh Arabs. Somebody’s got to give some careful thought to what should happen with that.

Of course, it’s hard to build infrastructure if people are going to go around blowing it up. We do have the methods to figure out what should be done, and we ought to be using them.