Right now it's just seems that a new empowered group is going to suppress the other groups of ppl, no matter which group it turns out to be in the end. Iraq needs a secular government (which is unlikely because of the culture) or a PM who governs the country with a hard hand.
The Iraqi community will only accept what is happening in their families. A strong man who controls the family (society).
The family is society's smallest building block and is also reflected in the management of the state.
Perhaps governing the S`porean way is exactly what they need?
Saddam Hussein ordered the killings of more than 1,000,000 Iraqi during his reign...in addition to this he ensured the total obliteration of several ethnic groups with the use of sarin gas. Saying that the Iraqi ppl could "lead a normal life" under him, or that the Iraqi population was a particularly happy population during this time, is extremely naive.
So of cuz the Iraqi ppl care who is the PM. I do agree that they most of all want to return to normalcy, but who would expect otherwise?
Why do you belive "the Sg way is not a model for other country to copy or adopt"?
Every country needs different method to govern. It is not wise to say because SG model is successful, it will like-wise be successful in other country such as Iraq as well.
On a side-note, what makes you think Sg is such a good role-model for other country to follow in the first place? Because of the GDP?
Originally posted by TTFU:What do you think you know but you do not know anything
Referring to??
Originally posted by Jonstranded:
The family is society's smallest building block and is also reflected in the management of the state.
I don't believe in that idea.
Originally posted by Jonstranded:
Perhaps governing the S`porean way is exactly what they need?
Singapore is under autocratic model which was the Saddam model. So they already had that. One family, one tribe dominate power under one party, that's saddam and Singapore's model. They had that already.
Originally posted by Moka:Every country needs different method to govern. It is not wise to say because SG model is successful, it will like-wise be successful in other country such as Iraq as well.
On a side-note, what makes you think Sg is such a good role-model for other country to follow in the first place? Because of the GDP?
Agreed. A method of govern will very likely turn out differently - ppl are different. It is not granted it will be successful in Iraq. However, I do not think that means it is not possible to use ideas from other countries, at least when they indeed has been successfully applied there.
To answer your question, I did not think of the GDP. Merely the fact that S`pore is one of the safest cities in the world, Baghdad is absolutely not. The risk of aqquiring serious injury when walking 5 km through Baghdad is approaching 40%. (In S`pore it is 0%, but who walks 5 km here anyways...?)
Of cuz this is not only due to governing, but it can be argued that governing definitely has played a major role.
Originally posted by BJK:The Sg way is not a model for other country to copy or adopt. They the Iraqi, the magority do not care who is the PM. What they want is return to normalcy where they can work, earn a living and carry on with their family like people of other countries. The invader US, create all the problems and most world leaders just watch or provide lip-service helps and try to return the environment to normalcy. Under the late Saddam, the Iraqi could lead a normal life and even the Christain community was happy. See what happen now the Iraqi Christain coummunity – most have fled.
I loled at this. Do you realise that Saddam Hussein is a dictator in iraq ? Which means that if you disagree with him, you are dead. People in iraq do not have human rights/ freedom of speech etc. People do not voice out because they fear for their lives. Serious Corruption exist in iraq to make people's lives even worse. Do not care versus unable to voice out has a huge difference
Originally posted by Jonstranded:Agreed. A method of govern will very likely turn out differently - ppl are different. It is not granted it will be successful in Iraq. However, I do not think that means it is not possible to use ideas from other countries, at least when they indeed has been successfully applied there.
To answer your question, I did not think of the GDP. Merely the fact that S`pore is one of the safest cities in the world, Baghdad is absolutely not. The risk of aqquiring serious injury when walking 5 km through Baghdad is approaching 40%. (In S`pore it is 0%, but who walks 5 km here anyways...?)
Of cuz this is not only due to governing, but it can be argued that governing definitely has played a major role.
I see, so safety is the key issue we are talking about. I think the major problem is religion intolerance, war and oil issue, which lead to many many sub problems like poverty. And poverty is enough to let anything happen in a country. Because it is not a country problem. It is the whole of Middle East that is facing the same issue. Everday their neighbour will shoot friendly homemade "missle" to each other as morning greeting, not reported in the news only. I agree, strong governance and military power is a must.
Singapore is a relatively small and new country, so using singapore as role model for Iraq is not very good, because it does not have that much problems as Iraq.Especially the restriction of freedom of speech. However, if I die die must say one country as role model, it would be Turkey, but what I know about the country is only surface deep.
Originally posted by Jonstranded:Agreed. A method of govern will very likely turn out differently - ppl are different. It is not granted it will be successful in Iraq. However, I do not think that means it is not possible to use ideas from other countries, at least when they indeed has been successfully applied there.
To answer your question, I did not think of the GDP. Merely the fact that S`pore is one of the safest cities in the world, Baghdad is absolutely not. The risk of aqquiring serious injury when walking 5 km through Baghdad is approaching 40%. (In S`pore it is 0%, but who walks 5 km here anyways...?)
Of cuz this is not only due to governing, but it can be argued that governing definitely has played a major role.
Give some time to iraq just like how democracy does not occur in one night. People are poor/ business and trading are poor etc. All these takes time to build up. In order to control people, you need certain rules and propaganda. All these exist in Sg, but not as bad as in other country like china where youtube/facebook gets banned. Of course not as open as US, where freedom of speech is allowed.
For people who don't understand Iraq, how important are family and tribal connections in that society?
Family and tribal connections are supreme. They come ahead of ideology. They come ahead of commitment to the nation-state, they come ahead of all commitments. Saddam Hussein realizes that. This is why, at a certain point, he transferred power from the Ba'ath Party, which put him in power, to his family, because he decided that the family can be trusted, but the party cannot be trusted.
He weakened the party and strengthened the family, and that is the situation in the country now. His second son is the head of the dreaded security system. His first son, who was a psychopath, runs all types of committees in the country. His brother is on the security system, his cousins are in key positions in the army. The people who come from Al Awja are in other positions in the army. The people who come from Tikrit, the town near Al Awja, are in other positions. It's a pyramid of relationships, tribal and familial. And this is what he depends on. And, those people are loyal to him, because they believe that if Saddam goes, they will go as well.
Why were you working for the regime of Saddam?
There is a whole generation of people like me. We are about the same age as Saddam -- I'm two years older actually -- who believe that is where the Arab dream was -- in Iraq. Iraq had wealth, it had population, it had prospects, it had a strong army. They were not backward -- and I will use the word "backward" -- like some of the oil-producing countries. They offered us a future. And we took that chance. We were enamored with what Saddam was doing. Make no mistake about it. Anybody who tells you otherwise didn't know what Saddam was about. He's not telling the truth.
We knew Saddam was tough. But the balance was completely different then. He was also delivering. The Iraqi people were getting a great deal of things that they needed and wanted and he was popular. He eliminated people here and there. With time, as with all dictators, the balance switched. And all we saw of Saddam was elimination and very little benefit to the people.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/saddam/interviews/aburish.html
Originally posted by BJK:Saddam was a dictator but he did not killed 1,000,000 Iraqi but few hundreds people who opposed him.
I do not think your claim that he only killed a "few hundreds people who opposed him" is true. Pls read the following links and see for yourself.
http://wais.stanford.edu/Iraq/iraq_deathsundersaddamhussein42503.html
http://www.moreorless.au.com/killers/hussein.html
I think it is very safe to assume the man was a mass murderer. Even that could be considered an understatement.
My main point here is that as opposed to what many western politicians repeatedly claim, perhaps Iraq simply is not ready for total personal freedom and even democracy. Maybe, in a period of transience, strong governance and strict rules which are enforced, would be suitable? (not meaning killing and torturing like in Saddams days, of cuz...). And for this purpose S`pore, or Turkey as someone suggested, might be worth studying (role model is maybe taking it a bit too far though).
Would be interesting if we had an Iraqi here to ask!
Originally posted by Jonstranded:Maybe, in a period of transience, strong governance and strict rules which are enforced, would be suitable? (not meaning killing and torturing like in Saddams days, of cuz...).
But Saddam already tried that for 35 years.
Iraqi society I believe is a tribal society, so I think it must be governed under it's own unique system. It can't follow other states organised along non tribal lines.
For people who don't understand Iraq, how important are family and tribal connections in that society?
Family and tribal connections are supreme. They come ahead of ideology. They come ahead of commitment to the nation-state, they come ahead of all commitments. Saddam Hussein realizes that.
Another paradigm I want to establish is a difference between two kinds of civilizations, which means a difference between two kinds of governments in them. Asiatic civilizations, which I call Class B Civilizations, generally do not attempt to deal with individuals or with the problems of individuals; they leave interpersonal relationships to the local or kinship community.
Class A Civilizations include Classical Civilization, our own Western Civilization, or the first Chinese or Sinic Civilization, whose dates are 1800 B.C. to 400 A.D.
In Class A Civilizations, although the civilization begins as an area of common culture made up of communities, there is a long term trend to destroy and break down those communities.
The way I would like to express this would be -- and I used to draw it on the blackboard -- by saying that all civilizations start out as aggregations of communities.
Those communities are generally of two types, either local, such as parishes, neighborhoods, villages, or manors; or kinship communities, families, clans, and so forth.
When a civilization begins with such communities, as ours did in 550, there is no state, and there are no atomized individuals. I will not go into the details of this, but in such communities, there are no written laws; all law is customary.
Most controls on behavior are what I call internalized, that is, they are built into your hormones and your neurological responses. You do what is necessary to remain a member of the community, because if you were not a member of the community, you would be nothing. You would not be a man.
As you may know if you have ever studied linguistics, the names which many primitive and not-so-primitive peoples have for themselves is their word for man. The communities from which Classical Civilization came were clans, kinship groups; the communities from which Western Civilization came were local villages and manors. Lucky civilizations, such as Chinese Civilization over the past 1500 years, generally have communities which are both kinship and local.
What happens in the course of a Class A Civilization, over a thousand or more years, is that the fundamental communities are broken up and gradually disintegrate into smaller and smaller groups, and may end up simply as what we call nuclear families, a father and a mother, who eventually lose all discipline and control of their children. The result of this process is a state which is not only sovereign but totalitarian, and it is filled with isolated individuals.
Of the four civilizations which came out of Classical Antiquity's wreckage, two, Islamic and Byzantine, clearly are Class B Civilizations, that is, they continued to work for communities. Their governments were governments of limited powers, of which the most important were raising money and recruiting soldiers.
The finest example of such an Asiatic Despotism was the Mongolian Empire of Jenghiz Khan about A. D. 1250, but its origins go back to the Persian Empires of the Achaemenids and the Sassanids. Good examples of such a structure are the Chinese Civilization of 220-1949, the Byzantine Empire after 640, and the Islamic sultanates which eventually culminated in the Ottoman Empire. The efforts of the Carolingian Franks to establish a similar empire in Western Civilization collapsed and led to the Dark Age of 860-970.
These eastern political traditions might be called Providential Empire or Providential Monarchy, and they are associated with the idea of a Providential Deity. To us today, who shove religion off into a corner and insist that it must have nothing to do with politics or business or many other things, it may be hard to grasp that one of the most potent things in establishing the structure of the state in any civilization has always been men's ideas of the nature of deity. I will not take time to give you my paradigm for that; I'll simply point out to you something which should be obvious. The deity -- God -- has many different attributes. He is creator; he is masculine; he is transcendental, that is, he is outside of the world of space and time -- that was established by 500 B.C. Eventually, he is one; that is what Muhammad insisted on. And then he is omnipotent, all-powerful. I stop at this point; Providential Empires never got further than this...
http://www.carrollquigley.net/Lectures/The-State-of-Communities-AD-976-1576.htm
So we can clearly see that under Islamic areas such as in Iraq, the basic social unit is still the tribal organisation, while those areas in the west, those tribal organisations had been destroyed and disintegrated.
I still maintain that the late Saddam did not killed as much civilians as US and the coalition forces. The high figures were inflated by certain western reports for their own benefits. Remember WMD in Iraq. Can we trust certain western reports in world matters?
Originally posted by BJK:I still maintain that the late Saddam did not killed as much civilians as US and the coalition forces. The high figures were inflated by certain western reports for their own benefits. Remember WMD in Iraq. Can we trust certain western reports in world matters?
Probably not. But I do believe we can trust the Iraqis themselves.
Originally posted by BJK:I still maintain that the late Saddam did not killed as much civilians as US and the coalition forces. The high figures were inflated by certain western reports for their own benefits. Remember WMD in Iraq. Can we trust certain western reports in world matters?
Saddam dun rule iraqi for 5 or 10 years, he ruled them since the iraqi and iran war, the US of A just want a control of oil in the middle east, the day Saddam refused to co operate to give US of A a stake of the oil field, all accusation set in.
During the iraqi and iran war, saddam was a good USA ally, he gives US a stake to operate in their oil field which the US had already been operating in jordan and saudi, in return, US supported Iraqi against Iran, on the other hand, US diplomats secretly sell arms to Iran to fight the war, war in the Arab world is a blessing for USA, firstly, US can enter the oil market, secondly can sell arms and thirdly, break the brotherhood of muslim Arabs.
When Saddam come to know the motives of US, he declared for peace with Iran, whacked Kuwait because of it close ally with US, just to chase the US away. And because the US cannot control the oil fields in Iraq, they start to wrongly accuse Saddam of whatever they can throw in, from dictators to WMD etc etc,,...and because Saddam knows the dirty side of USA, the US need to quite him and shut him off. Therefore, in attacking iraq it is both personal and business in term of oil field for the USA.
And all these wars was sponsored by many countries, Japan, britain etc etc and even singapore and all other close ally of US. Singapore govt can never be like Saddam, because Saddam is better than them, he cares for his peoples and get rid of those who is hurting the nation by foreign influence. I have much respect for him, and certainly Singapore govt cannot match up to his benevolences and empathy toward his subjects and citizens way of ruling.
Angel, sometime you do write some sense. Thank you for the above.
Woei BJ!!, u mean all the while i wrote nonsense hor...
Angel, yes you do write nonsense. I just read your comment on newater. You suggested we buy newater from US and Sg sell newater to US. Isn't this nonsense. US have for decades. recycle its water especially in New York.
well, am i wrong to said it is shit water?? i did not said that is bad , in fact i drank and use it in taiwan too.
--- wrong thread ----
please dun go out of topic..