A bloodbath in Iraq if we leave ?

[kentuck]

What would cause the bloodbath? There would be a bloodbath without an established government with policemen and security, we are told. If we leave, would people flock to join the insurgent movement or would its numbers stay about the same? Or would their numbers go down? If the Shiites or Kurds try to lord it over the Sunnis as payback for the Saddam years, there will be continued violence, most people would agree. So where would the bloodbath occur? If the Shiites and Kurds did not seek revenge, it seems the major problem would be dealing with the violence of the Sunnis, car bombs and assassinations, just like we are doing today. But bloodbath? Where would it happen?

[babylonsister]

1. Seems to me there already is a bloodbath there.

I think if we got out there'd be far less bloodletting...

[Kagemusha]

2. If you haven't noticed, Kurds and Shiites ARE the police now.

Process of elimination and political patronage.

So Shiites will be purging secular Shiites and "Baathists" (Shiite as well as Sunni), Kurds will be purging ethnic Arabs and Turkomen, and Sunnis will be fighting everyone.

[Yupster]

3. Here's my guess

If we leave the insurgents will fight the largely Shi-ite government with assassinations and bombings.

The government will muddle along for while, but eventually it will lose patience and it will look the other way while the Shi-ite militias, especially the Sadr Army is called forth and sweeps through the Sunni triangle with a vengeance to get revenge for 25 years of torture and killings.

I believe there is a good chance the Sunni population could be the target of genocide and sent to flight to Syria.

Maybe I'm just a pessimist, but when the Sadr Army was told to stand down a year or so ago, I didn't see that as a permanent situation. I felt it was a call for patience until the US isn't around anymore to impede their plans.

[alcibiades_mystery]

4. that's what they said about vietnam

and it never happened.

[Yupster]

5. It didn't?

I guess it depends on what the definition of a bloodbath is, but Vietnam certainly sent people away to reeducation camps for years. One of my neighbors was in one.

Also Cambodia had bloodbath enough for all of them. I also have neighbors who escaped the Khmer Rouge through the jungles into Thailand losing an uncle to mortar fire on the way.

In Laos, the Hmong were to suffer and are still suffering for being on the wrong side of that war when it ended.

I would also add that a difference between Iraq and Vietnam was the government side (ARVN) did not have the ability to field huge militias like the Shi-ites do, should a Civil War erupt.

[IndianaGreen]

8. The lesson: don't choose the side of the colonial power

We would have done the same thing to those Americans that collaborated with a foreign invader.

[Yupster]

9. We didn't have any "Killing Fields"

for Tories after the Revolution, though thousands did flee to Canada.

[IndianaGreen]

11. We put quite a few of them on ships bound for England

and we are more efficient at killing now than we were in the eighteenth century, and more violent too.

[alcibiades_mystery]

15. The Killing Fields happened in Cambodia, not Vietnam

And the People's Army of Vietnam stopped the Cambodian genocide when they invaded Cambodia to depose the mad Pol Pot.

A point little acknowledged: it was the Vietnamese communists who put an end to the Cambodian genocide.

[IndianaGreen]

20. Ask our Native Americans about the "killing fields"

The US government supported the Pol Pot regime, the same regime responsible for the "Killing Fields" you are so concerned about. Why was that, you asked? Perhaps it is because the Vietnamese toppled the Khmer Rouge from power, but because white America couldn't stand the thought of the Vietnamese whipping our asses, we chose to support Pol Pot. How's that for American morality?

[alcibiades_mystery]

14. The vast majority of ARVN enlisted spent

2 days on average in "reeducation" camps - far less than the Germans after WWII. Some officers spent more time in custody, but most were out in a ouple of weeks. I'd be really intetrested to hear about anyone who spent "years" in a "reeducation" camp. The Red Cross is on record saying that the treatment of collaborators after the fall of the fake RVN government was far less severe than the treatment of collaborators after the liberation of France. Is the DRV a happy-go-lucky government? No, of course not. Have the minority Hmong been shit on by the Vietnamese from time immemorial? Yes, that's why they were such eager allies to the Americans. The treatment of the ethnic Chinese Vietnamese was also shameful - these are the folks that made up much of the exodus by boat in the late 1970's. They had five strikes against them from the perspective of the DRV: first, they were traditional ethnic minority within a rampantly xenophobic Vietnamese culture; second, they collaborated extensively with the Americans; third, they were a traditional merchant class in a society transitioning toward state socialism; fourth, they were mostly situated in urban areas (particulaly the Cholon area of Ho Chi Minh City), whereas the rebellion in the South was mostly directed by rural cadre (this is excluding PAVN regulars, of course, many of whom came from the urban centers of the north); finally, the Chinese sided with the Cambodian regime in the land dispute that led to war between the DRV and the Khmer Rouge (Pol Pot declared traditional borders of "Kampuchea" to extend all the way to Gia Dinh!), and the Vietnamese were at war with China by 1979. While this group was surely oppressed and ultimately expelled en masse, they were not subject to any kind of mass murder that could be considered a "bloodbath," nor were they specially selected for "reeducation." The Red Cross is on record on this point, so there's that. The DRV is not a happy-go-lucky government, but the state of affairs after the liberation of the southern part of Vietnam from colonial control was no worse than the state of affairs under the puppet colonial government of the RVN.

As for the Khmer Rouge, they were NOT Vietnamese, so that's a different issue. Nixon and company warned of a bloodbath in South Vietnam for years, and it simply did not materialize. That there was a bloodbath in Cambodia is a different issue. Of course, the bloodbath in Cambodia can be attributed in no small part to the installation of Lon Nol by the American administration, and the subsequent bombings of the Cambodian countryside which gave a piddling little shit like Pol Pot credibility and popularity among the peasant class, but that's beside the point as well. We should also remember that it was the People's Army of Vietnam that STOPPED the Cambodian genocide when they invaded Cambodia to depose Pol Pot in 1979, a move the US OBJECTED TO in the UN!

[Zynx]

6. You didn't want to be an ARVN officer or South Vietnamese Intelligence...

Justified or not, the NVA wasn't very kind to non-conscripts.

[Yupster]

10. Supposedly there are some books out soon

written by ARVN soldiers during the war.

It might be interesting as there has been very little said about them though they did most of the figting and took by far more casualties than we did.

I'm particularly interested in reading about the 1974 fighting from ARVN's perspective.

[IndianaGreen]

7. America is the reason there is a bloodbath in Iraq since March 2003

Get the troops out of Iraq now before they get caught in the middle of the coming civil war, a war in which our troops will side with the ayatollahs of Iran (who are the ones calling the shots in Iraq).

[sendero]

12. There's going to be a bloodbath..

.... whether we stay or leave.

[Cosmocat]

13. YEP ...

It has been PROVEN that there is going to a regular "insurgency" WITH the US there ... The only way it can be contained at this point would be a MASSIVE influx of troops ... Reinvade the country, then completely occupy it ...

With the current set up, which is like that old arcade game Kill the Groundhog, there just is now way the country can be stabilized ...

[Independent_Liberal]

16. There will be no bloodbath if we leave.

We were told that back during Vietnam. People kept saying, "If we leave, there will be a bloodbath." But we left and there was peace, not violence. The Iraqis want us to leave. They will be a lot better off when we're gone.

[FogerRox]

17. There isnt a civil war going on now?

there isnt ethic cleansing going on now

[skip fox]

18. To answer root question, probably so.

And it's sad to say. It will probably occur anyway, maybe a little slower if we stay.

The entire was doomed from the onset.

[Imagevision]

19. AS in Senior Bush did in desert storm