Quote:
Originally Posted by hot dragon
i apologise if this issue has been done to death. i am australian, and the general view here is that the afghanistan war is very different to the iraq war. iraq is seen as a mistake, an ongoing nightmare which we are pulling out of because we should never have been there in the first place.
afghanistan is seen differently. it is viewed as a just war, a neccessary war driven by totally different reasons and with a different aim. australia has had one death in iraq which was interpreted as a complete waste, totally unneccesary and unjust and another good reason to get the hell out. there have been several deaths in afghanistan which is seen as the inevitable toll of war, but we still need to stay the course and fight the good fight.
i was wondering if the same sort of division is seen anywhere else. the media tend to report on both wars as if they are the same thing, but nobody else thinks of them as related at all. does america, or any of the other involved nations, have the same kind of view ? and is the media interpreting them differently or just the population ?
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Well that is the general gist of it. Except now the media and anti-administration public has spilled there hatred against Afghanistan as well.
And Iraq, as controversial as it can be seen, was not a total waste. A dictator was overthrown, the local population has turned against radical elements including Al-Queada and other terrorist networks and extremists (part of a larger positive movement in the middle east right now), the people were freed-- kurds refer to coalition forces as "the liberators"--, and a democratic representational government is being established to solve issue that were once controlled either controlled by military power and tyrannical rule or religous zealots vying for power. The tension beneath Iraq was always there, it was only waiting for Saddam to lose power--and Saddam bred it under his regime. The question of oil, un-prepared for casualties mostly on account of sectarian killings and bombings, and poor intelligence on Wmds is still in effect and definately affected policies going into the war. Its a shade of grey--some political motivations for war were ulterior, some were not--the outcome has had violence, but also change and the dawn of a better time for Iraqis as the country is repaired and a democracy is put into place. Hopefully things will end on a positive note.