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SCOTUS Grants Guantanamo Prisoners Habeas Corpus
beebee and other readers sent word that the US Supreme Court has, by a 5 to 4 majority, ruled that the Constitution applies at Guantanamo. Accused terrorists can now go to federal court to challenge their continued detention (the right to habeas corpus), meaning that civil judges will now have the power to check the government's designation of Gitmo detainees as enemy combatants. This should remedy one of the major issues Human Rights activists have with the detention center. However, Gitmo is unlikely to close any time soon. The NYTimes reporting on the SCOTUS decision goes into more detail on the vigor of the minority opinion. McClatchy reports the outrage the decision has caused on the right, with one senator calling for a Constitutional amendment "to blunt the effect of this decision."
Sudden outbreak of common sense?
Ok -- so we capture people on the battle field in Afghanistan and take them prisoner. Bush &co. don't want to classify them as "prisoners of war," because then they'd get Geneva Convention protection.
So, reaching back to FDR, they pull this "enemy combatant" thing out of their ass and say that now they can do whatever they want. Now, the Supreme Court is saying that "enemy combatants" are somehow criminals who are entitled to the protections of the civilian legal system.
If they were just reclassified as POWs, then they could be held until the war is over -- which, like the war on drugs, it never will be. So, they could be held forever, without any need for a trial - because you can't be tried for "murder" or "conspiring to murder Americans" if you are a soldier in time of war.
But yet, Bush &co still aren't going to want to reclassify them as POWs.
Jeebus. I seriously can't wait to get a new administration that will just settle on what the status of these prisoners is so that we don't have to hear about this crap anymore. Want to keep them forever? Call them POWs. Want to try them to make some sort of b.s. point like Nuremberg? Then they get the protection of a court system.
I'm really not seeing how they can have it both ways, but then again I'm not a lawyer -- just a human (usually an exclusive option).
Recommended reading that didn't make it into this story's writeup:
Glenn Greenwald, Supreme Court restores habeas corpus:
Glenn Greenwald, Conservative vs. authoritarianism:
The decision itself, with my favorite passage being:
In that passage, the Court upbraids the Bush administration, which sought this unconstitutional law and argued to uphold it, for claiming that the President has the right to "switch the Constitution on or off at will." The Court is absolutely correct about this, there is no doubt that this is what our current President has attempted. And the Court is correct that this is an attempt to circumvent the system of separation of powers that is at the heart of the "basic charter" on which the United States was founded.
The fact that this decision was a slim 5-4 majority, with this President's two appointees making up half the dissenting view, is a frightening thought.
They're the farthest thing from it. Real patriots understand why we must defend these rights, even at the cost of our lives -- because without them, we aren't the United States of America; we're just another transient tinpot dictatorship of no value and no lasting importance.
There's a difference between citizen's rights (voting, welfare) and human rights which are universally applicable (free speech, etc). My personal belief is that not being imprisoned without just cause, and being able to challenge your imprisonment is in the latter set.
I'm at a loss as to how anyone can be upset at this decision. Its not like we're turning known terrorists out onto American streets. We're just saying that the people being detained have a right to challenge their detainment.
What bothers me is that 4 Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States voted to suspend Habeas Corpus.
If this were easy, they wouldn't need us to do it!
I came here for a good argument
So it takes approximately 7 years between blatently unconstitutional actions by one branch to be reviewed and overturned by another branch.
Fortunately for Congress and the President, they can pass new laws and executive orders on time scales shorter than 7 years.
In between lies the downfall of democracy.
1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
We cannot allow ourselves to become the things and people we hate. We cannot become a nation that approves of torture, approves of lawless legal system, a nation that will treat others, no matter how heinous, as they would treat us.
We cannot hope to be a beacon of light in a dark sea by covering ourselves in the same darkness. Either you do the moral thing, or the immoral thing. There is a battle in this country, between those who would have us give up our morality for naught, and those who stand against them.
A 5-4 decision means that the somewhat-sane members of the court outnumbered the completely-crazy members of the court by One Single Vote. We've got ourselves a Supreme Court that's divided on the meaning of some of the most fundamental aspects American law. This doesn't bode well for the next 30 years.
-Sean
These fundamental freedoms are MORE important, not LESS important, during times of national stress. It is those times when cowards like Bush are most prepared to sell our freedom, so hard-won over the centuries, for the promise of a little temporary security.
Guantanamo is Bush's Manzanar. In the hysteria of the time it might have seemed like the right thing to do, to a few frightened people. The judgment of history will be firmly otherwise.
I piss off bigots.
Scalia's comments
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Actually, it's more than that. It isn't a restriction on an otherwise-unlimited government, it's a grant of powers to an otherwise-powerless government.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
woo-hoo, Those detainees are going to be partying like it's 1679.
It's been established for a helluva long time that the Constitution does apply to foreigners on American soil. The police are still bound by due process, even if the suspect is an Englishman or from North Korea. The Gitmo trick (and the unknown number of secret prisons) was to claim that the foreign detainees were not on American soil, so any Constitutional obligation was removed. SCOTUS has dispensed with that pathetic notion and finally stated that where there's smoke there's fire; in other words, if a detention center on foreign soil is still run by the United States, the detainees should have the same right to habeus corpus as if they were within US borders. This is a victory for liberty.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The plural of "anecdote" is not "data," but from what I've heard talking to elderly Germans who fought as Wehrmacht in WWII and got picked up by us (or their grandchildren), they were indeed pretty well-treated. They do not seem to be bitter about their time as POWs. Most importantly, once returned to Germany, they had no desire to take up arms against the occupying US forces, much less attack the US elsewhere - they just wanted to get on with their lives.
Grüß Gott aus Bayern!
Several highly simmilar cases have come before the supreme court and all were very difficult decisions. The two most important ones were President Lincoln indefinitely detaining without trial citizens and press who spoke in favor of the confederacy. Unlike to day, where there is no declaration of war, Lincoln thought the consitution gave him the right to suspend Habeous. But the supreme court said it only applied in zones of conflict not the rear. And even under times of duress the constitution could not be switched off. Today's supreme court said almost exactly the same thing in the summary.
Then FDR also created the concept of "enemy combatants" for handling people who were spies captured inside the US boarders. While he should have treated them as Spies under war common law, instead he wanted their trials publicly suppressed and created a special tribunal outside the jurisdictions of any state but on US soil. The supremes had to argue about it. The argument was that clearly the US legal system can try people crimes so why not let it. And it would set a bad precedent for removing habeous for people captured outside war zones.
The book "In time of War" covers this an it's a great well written read. I recommend it highly.
I thought the following quote captured one aspect of the issue:
"But the real problem is the interminable detention period, which has no reasonable judicial excuse. The dissenters are quite right that America has offered a quite generous set of procedural protections for enemy combatants. But these are mocked when a detainee is an indefinite prisoner with indefinitely incomprehensible status. The problem is not the legal process but what happens when the federal government holds that process, at its whim, in open-ended abeyance. The federal government still gets a lot of leeway, and the benefit of the doubt, from the Court, especially in wartime. But ours is so nonobviously wartime, and the Bush administration has been so lax, opaque, and seemingly quite pointless in its interminable detention of a wide range of variably important prisoners, that todayÂs ruling seems to me to confirm the wisdom of both the majority and the dissent. I suspect the ruling will, if anything, cause most of these detainees to actually be tried, which would be nice, but not released, which would not be. And that strikes me as not only nice but just."
link
A good question is where does McCain stand on obeying the Constituional restrictions faithfully. Here's two articles from Reason Magazine (libertarian bent):
Longer and Shorter
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
How do we know that they're the government's enemies? You're assuming that because they're there they deserve to be there. Me, I'd kinda like there to be, you know, evidence... that whole pesky due-process thing. I'd rather not be wasting government money and what little good-will we have left in the world holding people when we can't even reasonably say that they are a threat.
...) sieze an American. They say that for, national security reasons, they can't reveal why they are imprisoning him, or provide any evidence that this person deserved to be imprisoned. We only have their word. Is that ok? Thats what we're doing right now, and it needs to stop.
Here's a little thought experiment. The British (or Germans, or Japanese,
What scares me more is that the ruling was 5-4 instead of unanimous.
0x09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
Considering the Constitution of the United States was written largely by the same group who had written the Declaration of Independence, I think it is a difficult argument that the claims against the King would be allowed a pass for a new George.
The Declaration of Independence states that certain rights are endowed upon men by their Creator and unalienable. Among those are Life, Liberty, and pursuit of Happiness.
The charges against King George which justified the revolution included, "He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power" and "For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences".
The preamble to the Constitution itself lists one of the reasons for its ordination as to "establish justice".
Article III section 2 states that the judicial power of the Supreme Court and the inferior courts extends to people including "a state, or the citizens thereof, and foreign states, citizens or subjects".
The 5th Amendment provides for indictment by grand jury and due process of law. It makes an exception for those serving in the military during war or public danger, but enemy combatants whether on the field of battle lawfully or unlawfully are not serving in our military.
The 6th Amendment requires that one be informed of the charges, to be confronted by witnesses against him, to have the power to subpoena witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel. No exception for military or maritime conditions are made in this Amendment.
Considering all of these facts, and considering that the founders who wrote and supported the one document were the writers and supporters of the other, I find it difficult to believe that anyone could seriously question the legal status of people being held as criminals indefinitely under the power of the United States.
The government specifically denied that these people were POWs. If they had been POWs, they could have been held until the end of hostilities with the countries in which they were captured. Being held as criminals, though, they have no fewer rights than American citizens under the US Constitution from what I can tell.
There's nothing I've read in the Constitution which says that non-citizens under the government's jurisdiction are to be treated differently from citizens in matters of criminal law. In fact, while the Constitution at one time allowed the historic fact of brutal slavery and racial subjugation, the Articles and the Amendments make clear distinctions in many cases between the words "citizen" and "person", and most of the protections are for the more generic "person". Now slavery is properly banned by the Constitution. Foreign parties accused of crimes should not be treated any differently than citizens, or what have we learned?
The other very important piece to securing a post-war peace was the Marshall Plan, designed to rebuild the shattered countries. The reason that the Weimar government in Germany was so screwed up and produced quadrulple-digit inflation was due to the fact that the winner countries in WWI forced Germany to make a lot of expensive reparations, and never helped them rebuild their industry or economy. That bad government in turn allowed Hitler his rise to power with the disaffected citizens and workers - and subsequent horror of the second war. It took a lot of effort and money to make the Marshall Plan work, but look at the Axis countries 70 years later - they are some of our strongest allies now!
The Constitution doesn't give us rights. The government doesn't give us rights. We have rights, inalienable rights, that come from "the Creator", whatever that is. The creator is a mysterious, unspecified entity, but it is not the Constitution or the government.
We, the people, create a government to protect those rights. In the USA, we (our forefathers) wrote a Constitution that our representatives explicitly agreed to support and defend. That Constitution creates a government from nothing, that protects those rights.
Those rights are inalienable. Even when the government fails to protect them, we still have those rights. But unless they're protected, we might not have the freedom to exercise them. That is why we create that government, which has no other power or even existence other than as we create it under the Constitution.
Americans aren't magically different from any other people. All people have the same inalienable rights. But what Americans have that is different is an American government that protects those rights. Foreigners have their own governments. It's up to them to protect their rights with their governments. Often they do not. But though it is in America's interest to help everyone we can to protect their rights, it is not automatically America's government's obligation to do so, unless Americans so instruct it. Even when we do, America is obligated to merely help those people free themselves , so they are free to create their own governments to protect their own rights.
That is what is fundamentally wrong with the Iraq War. Wrong with any occupying American government abroad. It's what was right with the US conversion of Japan and Germany from their tyrannies after WWII: we worked for several years to free those people, who then created their own governments.
But though we're not obligated to free anyone but ourselves, though our government is not obligated to protect anyone's rights but our own, our government is never free to violate those rights. The US government has no powers to violate any rights, except temporarily, according to explicit due process, and only when necessary to protect the rights of other Americans - like when jailing criminals, even suspending their rights to vote, freely travel and associate, and even to express themselves.
Americans in foreign lands have reduced protection of our rights by our government, as a matter of practical fact, but not from any change in our rights themselves. Foreigners in foreign lands have foreign governments that factor into the US ability and obligation to protect their rights, which is minimal.
But no one under control of the US, in US territory (including soverign military territory like Guantanamo) can see their rights infringed in any way.
Sometimes that happens. Sometimes the people in the government break the law, violate the Constitution. The Constitution of course has the remedy: prosecution and jail time, even impeachment. The Constitution isn't just some theoretical philosophy, but the only instrument which creates legitimate government power. And its power does not differ in application to anyone on US soil (with the sole and irrelevant exception that a US president must have been born American).
There shouldn't have been any question that Habeas Corpus must apply to everyone in US custody. But of course the 4 dissenting "Justices" in this case also installed George Bush as president. These people are part of a blatantly, flagrantly anti-American conspiracy among themselves to destroy America and everything it stands for.
Everyone knows it. Lots of us say it. But only far too few of us have the courage and integrity to live it. And we, the Americans with a clear conscience, want to bring these evildoers to justice.
The Constitution. Dodging a bullet today that should never have been fired, that should have seen millions of Americans jumping to take the hit. The closeness of this call is just one 87 year old man away from making a total mockery of America as "the land of the free, the home of the brave."
--
make install -not war
True. In the case of the Nazi, you know he's an enemy.
With many of those in Guantanamo, we didn't have that assurance before we put them there.
(Though, to be fair, we can probably pretty much count on it now.)
If the masses can keep you down, you're not the Ubermensch.
1) Earier Supremes say it's okay for Bush to deny Habeous in US criminal courts so long as an alternative is provided that is substanially simmiar to the habeous right to contest incarceration.
2) congress provides an alternative tribunal system that fulfills this requirement
3) Said new tribunal turns around and refuses to hear any Habeous claims because it decrees the prisoners have no Habeous rights. (WILD!)
4) Today's court ruling reverses that saying they do have habeous rights.
The question then is Does it go back to the Kangaroo court or to a real crimminal court for hearing of habeous claims. I think this is the point of contention.
Also here's a link to a longer slashdot post that talks about this:
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
It is not the job of SCOTUS to be safe and responsible. It is the job of SCOTUS to knock down unconstitutional laws.
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
Read the dissenting opinion.
Today the Court strikes down as inadequate the most generous set of procedural protections ever afforded aliens detained by this country as enemy combatants. The political branches crafted these procedures amidst an ongoing military conflict, after much careful investigation and thorough debate. The Court rejects them today out of hand, without bothering to say what due process rights the detainees possess, without explaining how the statute fails to vindicate those rights, and before a single petitioner has even attempted to avail himself of the law's operation.Bolding mine. How would anyone know if they've tried to use the courts if they haven't had access to them in the first place? And saying that Habeas Corpus isn't a "time-honored legal principal"?
Amazing, isn't it?
Quotes taken from here.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
It has nothing to do with the fact that they're foreign nationals, nor that it happens "abroad". The federal government has no powers that the constitution does not grant. They can't do anything "abroad" nor to foreign nationals without constitutional power. It's not as though they have infinite power outside our borders "just because".
The consitution says, "The privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it." This specifically states that unless there is rebellion or invasion, the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended. There is no rebellion or invasion in progress, therefore, the federal government, both the executive and legislative branches, has no power to suspend the writ of habeas corpus, which is the power of the judicial branch to review any and all detainments, jailings, or imprisonments.
There's nothing in the consitution that states that the executive and legislative branches can operate internationally, but the judicial branches cannot review international actions. The three branches of government are co-equal. I hate this recent distaste for judges by conservatives who want to reinterpret the laws of the land to let their idiot of a president do whatever they want. The judges are doing their duty to interpret the law. The fact that they're not elected by popular vote is BY DESIGN and should not be used to try to make their *co-equal* role seem less important.
The constitution doesn't apply to a particular location. It applies to a particular federal government, regardless of the location. The consitution says, the government cannot restrict habeas corpus, it doesn't say, it cannot restrict habeas corpus on US citizens. Habeas corpus isn't a right of American Citizens defined affirmatively in the consitution, instead, the federal government is prohibited from suspending the right period, with no other conditions. Currently, the government is claiming the power to suspend the right of habeas corpus for the people at gitmo. The constitution says, NO, you cannot suspend that right. Doesn't matter who. Doesn't matter where.
As far as your argument of "will Al Qaeda reciprocate"? Do we decide our standards of behavior by the enemy's standards of behavior? For example, the enemy punishes us by attacking civilians, so why don't we attack civilians aligned with their cause or civilians whom they claim to represent and fight for? Would that be the right thing to do? It's really sad to me that people don't understand the *reason* we're the good guys is the fact that we're willing to fight based on principles, and that Americans have been willing to die for those principles for as long as this nation has existed. Fools who would give up those principles in a heartbeat for security, fools who would disgrace all those who fought and died fighting the right way, when we could have won faster by fighting the wrong way, those people don't understand what it means to be an American. If more Americans have to die to defend the constitutional principles that make us who we are, then at least they die as Americans, rather than reducing themselves to the level of the terrorists. By giving up our principles and violating our constitution, we let the terrorists win, because we let them take away who we are and we let them take away what we believe in.
I prefer to believe that we can beat these people, that we can chase them down and kill them, without violating our principles and without giving up who we are. I'm willing to accept that there is a greater risk that there might be more terrorist attacks, and that my city could be bombed, and that I could lose loved ones in this battle, if it means that we stay true to our American principles and we fight like the good, strong, and moral people that we consider ourselves to be, and I consider anyone who is unwilling to accept the additional risk involved with sticking to our principles to be a coward and to have no claim to patriotism, and have no understanding of what America is and why we're the greatest nation on Earth.
Some of these people were kidnapped by warlords, and handed over for a large sum of money.
Basically, the US is paying criminals to kidnap innocents, and then they imprison and torture these poor people, without a chance to be tried or heard or to have contact with the outside world. Their families might not even know what happened to them. They just disapeared.
The US has become the monster in the night that people fear.
You can't take the sky from me...
Tell this to the guy who was kidnapped, flown to Afghanistan, and Tortured for 5 months because he happened to have the same name as a suspected terrorist.
In 2003, Khalid El-Masri, a Kuwait-born citizen with German nationality, was detained by Macedonian agents in the Republic of Macedonia. While on vacation in Macedonia, local police, apparently acting on a tip, took him off a bus, held him for three weeks, then took him to the Skopje airport where he was turned over to the CIA.
El-Masri says he was injected with drugs, and after his flight, he woke up in an American-run prison in Afghanistan containing prisoners from Pakistan, Tanzania, Yemen and Saudi Arabia. El-Masri said that he was held five months and interrogated by Americans through an interpreter. He declared that he had been beaten and kept in solitary confinement. Participating in some of these interrogation sessions was an officer of the German foreign intelligence service (Bundesnachrichtendienst or BND) using the pseudonym "Sam", who has reportedly been identified by al-Masri as Gerhard Lehmann. Lehmann served on the UN Mehlis commission into the Rafik Hariri assassination before he was withdrawn in early February 2006, possibly to prevent the repercussions of his identification.[39]
Then, after his five months of questioning, he was simply released. "They told me that they had confused names and that they had cleared it up, but I can't imagine that," El-Masri told ABC News. "You can clear up switching names in a few minutes." Khalid el-Masri had allegedly been confused with Khalid al-Masri, wanted for contacts with the Hamburg Cell involved in the September 2001 attacks.
Khalid el-Masri was then flown out of Afghanistan and dumped on a road in Albania, from where he made his way back home in Germany. Using a method called isotope analysis, scientists at the Bavarian archive for geology in Munich subsequently analyzed several strands of his hair and verified his story. During a visit to Washington, German Interior Minister Otto Schily was told that American agents admitted to kidnapping El-Masri, and indicated that the matter had somehow got out of hand. Masri was held for five months largely because the head of the CIA's Counterterrorist Center's al Qaeda unit "believed he was someone else," one former CIA official said. "She didn't really know. She just had a hunch."
It's all a bit fuzzy. Your government appears to be reserving the right to pick up and intern anybody they fancy of any nationality in any country and declare they don't have to tell us why, and don't have to let the interned people go at any time.
That's one of the thing that really worries a lot of us. We don't trust your government, so we generalise and say "we don't trust the USA or its people". That's sad and not very healthy.
Even the top people on the losing side of World War 2 got trials and lawyers. You are saying that the people in Guantanamo Bay have carried out significantly worse acts than the people who stood in the Nuremburg trials?
The Marshall plan is kind of like what we SHOULD have done to Afghanistan after the soviets fled, but didn't. Also the Berlin airlift added to the effect that Marshall plan started. Making out enemies our friends. Hmmm Making our enemies our friends, who said that........
Here.
Salient extract from the summary:
1. Fifty-five percent (55%) of the detainees are not determined to have committed any hostile acts against the United States or its coalition allies.
2. Only 8% of the detainees were characterized as al Qaeda fighters. Of the remaining detainees, 40% have no definitive connection with al Qaeda at all and 18% are have no definitive affiliation with either al Qaeda or the Taliban.
3. The Government has detained numerous persons based on mere affiliations with a large number of groups that in fact, are not on the Department of Homeland Security terrorist watchlist. Moreover, the nexus between such a detainee and such organizations varies considerably. Eight percent are detained because they are deemed âoefighters for;â 30% considered âoemembers of;â a large majority â" 60% -- are detained merely because they are âoeassociated withâ a group or groups the Government asserts are terrorist organizations. For 2% of the prisoners their nexus to any terrorist group is unidentified.
4. Only 5% of the detainees were captured by United States forces. 86% of the detainees were arrested by either Pakistan or the Northern Alliance and turned over to United States custody.
Also from the report:
The United States promised (and apparently paid) large sums of money for the capture of persons identified as enemy combatants in Afghanistan and Pakistan. One representative flyer, distributed in Afghanistan, states:
Get wealth and power beyond your dreams....You can receive millions of dollars helping the anti-Taliban forces catch al-Qaida and Taliban murders. This is enough money to take care of your family, your village, your tribe for the rest of your life. Pay for livestock and doctors and school books and housing for all your people.
Bounty hunters or reward-seekers handed people over to American or Northern Alliance soldiers in the field, often soon after disappearing; as a result, there was little opportunity on the field to verify the story of an individual who presented the detainee in response to the bounty award.
I think the report is fairly damning.
Water boarding is definitely torture. (More, I think, than being forced to eat your own shit, which is neither terror-inducing nor immediately threatening to your life.) No one except a handful of far-right talking heads believes otherwise. The UN considers it torture, the US Defense Intelligence Agency considers it torture, and the US has prosecuted Japanese military members who used waterboarding against US prisoners with the understanding that it was torture.
There are a lot of people who deserve suffering. Many throughout the world might hold the US Joint Chiefs of Staff as culpable for comparable losses to their loved ones - and then the people who pay for and support them. But law, national or international, isn't about the grudges of the wronged.
Yes, well, to do something like the Marshall plan in Iraq presupposes... a plan. Speaking as someone who spent a year in Iraq with the US military, our plan was essentially "build some stuff and be nice to people, unless they annoy us in some way, then be rude." "Rude" had definitions that varied from simple rudeness in conversation, to firing warning shots without sufficient provocation to, in some of the most extreme cases, stuff like Abu Ghraib. In defense of the soldiers, "annoy us" could vary from roadside bombs, to being cut off in traffic (more serious than it sounds since in a minority of cases those sorts of cut offs were followed by planned ambushes and the afore mentioned roadside bombs).
The number of differences between Iraq and Postwar Germany are staggering:
1) The Bush Administration had no coherent post was plan. The Marshall Pan was very well thought out was being implemented even before the end of hostilities. We finished the war already prepared for, and in some cases already implementing, the rebuilding plan. What we're doing in Iraq may be to little and is certainly too late.
2) The Germans had a long tradition of self government, and the allies forgave former Nazi's who could reasonably show that they had not been involved in war crimes. This meant that the new German government could rely on the experience of life long government administrators. Most had worked for the Weimars before the Nazis, some had even worked for the Kaiser before that. It was simple enough to build a new government that more or less mirrored the old structure, just without the evil dictator at the top. By contrast the Iraqis have no real tradition of self government, having been under a series of colonial governors, hereditary kings and various strongmen for the last hundred or so years at least. We also "de-bathified" what experienced government officials existed, without giving them any chance to show whether or not they deserved it.
3) Germany did not have two (three if you count the Kurds) major ethnic groups that never really liked each other and only tolerated each other because they could agree on a mutual dislike of Saddam. Tragically this was at least partly because all of the other ethnic groups in Germany had been decimated by concentration camps, but it all the same it did make make post war integration easier.
4) Germany, the US and most of the other Axis and Allied powers could see, almost immediately after the War, that it was in all of their best interests to rebuild everything they could and stick together, because there was a serious mutual threat sitting off to the east. However much Germans mistrusted Brits and Americans or vice versa, they were all mutually terrified of what the USSR was doing. There is no such powerful motivator acting in Iraq.
The list goes on of course. Comparing the current situation to post War Europe is completely ridiculous. We are NEVER going to turn Iraq into the "Germany" of the Middles East. 6 years on, the best we can say is that the government is less oppressive that the old one, mostly because it's too damned incompetent to impose its will. The worst we can say is that in all ways other than a less oppressive government, the life of Ali the average Iraqi is worse than it was when we started. Who hoo.
I used to think that it was our moral obligation to leave Iraq at least as nice as we found it (though I thought we never should have invaded in the first place), but given that after all of these years it's obvious that:
a) we're incompetent boobs who screwed up the first 4 years of rebuilding and
b) The Iraqis themselves no longer seem to want our help
I think it's time to move on.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
What gets me: the current cost of the Iraq fiasco is, what, 3 trillion dollars?
We could have easily taken 1% of that, had a sit-down with Saddam Hussein and said, "look, you and your family and your core leadership take this money and transition quickly out of power and set up in a nice Caribbean resort for the rest of your life, and we won't wipe you out," then gradually shifted to a more representative government, and still had 2.7 trillion to throw around for little things like rebuilding after Katrina, widespread environmental projects, and lap dances for every adult male in America and Iraq put together.