Iraqis gone wild

When children go off to school, they are suddenly free to do what is cool and hip. Like drinking too much, pushing the sexual envelope, and listening to loud music. In prior generations, it also included doing drugs. Mom and Pop might have been control freaks, but now, they can go a little wild.

In Iraq, the control freak was Saddam Hussein. Now, with him gone, the citizens of Iraq, many not much older than college kids, can now go wild. But, they did not dream of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Their dreams were of violence, a Crypts vs Bloods, a Hatfield vs McCoy type of street violence, but taken to the wild extreme. As the Iraqis mature ethically, they will leave this wildness behind. But can we, the Americans who set these repressed kids free, live with what we have done? And was it a good thing?

While some paint the violence as being anti-American, I do not believe that is the main driving force. But, can we become part of the solution?

On an old episode of Star Trek, two rival mob gangs, only quit fighting when Captain Kirk promised that the Federation would be cut in to a piece of the action, and, as the most powerful, would take it badly if things did not go well. Perhaps, in fiction there may be an answer: a quadrilateral federation in charge of Iraq: Kurd, Sunni, Shiite, and American. They each govern their own, and together collect something to pay us. What we do with that is up to how they handle themselves. If they do a good job of self-policing, then we put our "piece of the action" back into infrastructure. If not, we take it in money and oil back to the USA. If they don't like it, tough, because we are the big boys. This type of approach would make them work with each other to keep us from taking our cut. Hey, nothing else seems to be working. If it was good enough for the 25th century, perhaps it is good enough for us.