Frenemies or Partition
As Iraq continues to fall into the hands of the group called Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), in the US, one set blames it on the original Bush-Blair invasion while the other set blames it on the subsequent withdrawal of US troops. Regardless of their internal politics, the US cannot and will not walk away from this entirely because of, duh, the oil. So with hindsight, was Saddam a necessary evil who, if nothing else, held the country together? Even Feisal Istrabadi, Iraq’s deputy ambassador to the United Nations from 2004-2007, who bristles at the question seems to agree that things have spun totally out of control after Saddam’s fall: “Let me first address the first part of your remark about, ‘well, [Saddam] may have been unpleasant, but …’ This is a man who is guilty of the deaths of no less than one million Iraqis over a period of 35 years. So there is no ‘he may have been a brutal tyrant’ … there is no ‘but’ after that, there’s no comma after that phrase. It’s ...