Ahh yes, the Iraq war. There are so many opinions on it, I knew that I had to contribute my 10 cents, or uhh 10 new dinars. Ok so here we go…..
How dumb do you have to be to commit the world’s largest and most powerful nation ever to a no win venture in Iraq. Lets face it when shock and awe started it all seemed pretty exciting, sort of like the fun you have when you are going to best buy to play the latest guitar hero package, even though you know you’re never going to buy it because Playstation 2 is for losers. But what were they thinking! Maybe we the population were naive enough to be optimistic about democracy for a country that was carved out of the desert by a colonial power without regard to the three seperate groups, Shia Sunni and Kurds that lived within the borders, but we weren’t elected nor paid to think about this stuff.
The governement is paid, and it seems they didn’t give it a second thought.
For us, it was just John Wayne swagerring in, beating up an oppressive dictator with a penchant for Cuban cigars and chemical weapons, and then turning control back over to the abundantly thankful Iraqi populace, who didn’t seem to mind that we had barged in and shocked and awed their cities into burnt and crisped. But when the Iraqis started ripping the toilet seats out of the governement ministries, even I knew something was wrong. Since then its all been downhill. Sure we can point to an election or two when we want to feel like the $600 billion and 3,000 lives we spent on this war was worth something, but lets face it. Things stink and are just going to get worse. Remeber when we were going to have the Iraqui’s pay for the war, I sure do and it sounded pretty good at the time.
When you read a bit about the history of Sunni and Shia, you quickly realize that they hate eachother. It all goes back a couple of thousand years, just before Brett Favre was drafted, to Muhammeds death and the fight over which Caliphs were supposed to be in charge. For my money, all religious wars are simply nuts but to these guys, “victory” is something worth having. Don’t the neocons read history and didn’t Bush at least have one conversation about this. He reports that he didn ‘t ask his father his opinion about whether to go to war. Well thats just great. There is one guy in the whole world who has done this before, I stand corrected, done this before to near perfection, including an exit strategy. He figured that if we threw out Sadam, what would happen next would resemble a hyena. Ugly. Since he couldn’t figre it out, he went home instead. Turns out it was good thinking. His son; though his very father was probably the best person in the world to ask about taking America to war in Iraq, (him and his generals) decided that he knew better, and brought us into Iraq without a workable strategy. Which brings us back to the toilets seats. Once a nation rips apart its government buildings we should have been smart enough to realize that they didn’t want them anymore. It turns out they were giving us a big signal that we missed. So now what?
I say that there is no reason to suspect that 1,000 years of religious war are going to end by election, so if we are going to be unsuccessful, I say be unsuccessful sooner rather than later. Lets go home. On the way out of Iraq, we ought to apoplogize and tell everyone we made a big mistake, that way maybe they won’t follow us home.
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