4,000 Americans died so a democratic Iraq could ban travel to Israel

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(Carl) More than 4,000 Americans died so that Iraq could have a parliament, and one of the first actions that parliament is taking is to ban travel to Israel.
The bill was proposed following a number of incidents at the Bagdad airport. A local security officer working there said the passport had caught a number of Iraqi officials carrying passports with Israeli entry visas. The officer, speaking on a condition of anonymity, reported that the passports of some nine high-profile Iraqi politicians were clearly marked with Ben-Gurion Airport stamps as well.
According to the source, the politicians made their first trips to Israel after the Iraqi elections, held on January 2010, until around October that same year. The officer claimed that during questioning of the Iraqis, it was discovered that they were operating as envoys to Israel on behalf of Iraqi politicians.
In response to the report, Iraqi Parliament Member from the National Iraqi Alliance Mohammad Redha al-Khafaji declared that some 50 parliament members have already put their John Hancock to a bill proposing to ban such trips to Israel. Khafaji emphasized that in the past, Iraqi senior officials had visited Israel secretly.
Meanwhile, a member of the parliament's judicial committee said these signatures do not necessarily mean that such a law should be passed.
Forbidding a citizen from traveling is against the Iraqis' right to freedom, as written in the constitution. However banning travel to Israel has nothing to do with politics, she told Al Jazeera, explaining that Iraq has never had any diplomatic or political relations with Israel, nor has it acknowledged the State of Israel.
The West suffers from two delusions. One is that having elections means you have a democracy. And the other is that if an Arab or Muslim country has a democracy, it will no longer seek to destroy Israel.
They forget that after World War II, the allied powers occupied Japan and Germany for a number of years to root out the toxic effects of Nazism and fascism, before turning those countries over to their own citizens who were ready to behave in a democratic way. Neither of those occupations had any time limit, but when it was time to end them, the allies (at least on the Western side of the Berlin Wall and in Japan) ended them.
Of course, to be able to do that without turning your troops into target practice dummies you first have to utterly defeat the other side militarily to the point of surrender. Has any country surrendered to a Western power since Japan? Not that I can recall.
Why not ban travel to Israel? Countries that are hip to the club scene like Dubai and Qatar already do. If I wanted to go back to the college I graduated from I couldn't take some classes because they are in Qatar. Why should Iraq be any different from any of the Arab nations that our media approves as exotic. Why would we be shocked? Try asking @Chevron on twitter if an Israeli is allowed to work for their energy company.... and meanwhile Nelson Mandela is calling Israel Apartheid. It all works in a certain consistent logic.

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