I read this story today, and the whole war situation continues to vex the holy living shit out of me.
I don’t claim to have as enlightened and well thought-out a view of things as some people, but here’s a simplified interpretation, as I see it.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that when you really boil it down, the only reason the American gov’t gives a shit about Iraq is because of the oil. An unstable Iraq = American energy crisis which we are in no way, shape, or form equipped to deal with. So the soldiers keep patrolling, the cars keep exploding, and everybody (military, civilian or otherwise) keeps dying.
Let’s pretend, for a second, that storming into another country based on the justification of a long series of lies can be wiped away with a “whoops.”
Forceably removing Saddam from power might be OK if the people you were going to leave in his wake gave you the least bit of confidence that they could actually
A) get along with each other, or
B) behave like adults
Did you catch this line: The 30 lawmakers and five Cabinet ministers loyal to al-Sadr had threatened to quit the government and parliament if al-Maliki went ahead with the summit, which aimed at halting Iraq’s escalating sectarian violence and paving the way for a reduction of U.S. troops.
This is the equivalent of your 4-year-old friend getting pissed at the way your 4-year-old self is playing the game and just taking his ball back home.
How are you supposed to reason with people like this? You can’t ask me to believe for a second that if this country was, say, shit—I dunno—Poland, for example (Poland doesn’t have any rare natural resource that drives our economy, do they?), that we wouldn’t have said, quite a long time ago, “Y’know what, fuck you guys. We are sooo outta here. Tell your mom to call us when you grow up.”
But instead, we sit across the table from a toddler who’s pointing a .45 in our collective face, all the while we’re handing them bullets and saying, “OK, don’t shoot it, though. No—no..! Don’t shoot it! Here, here’s another one…”
I really hate this stupid war, but I hate the circumstances and the people that dragged us into it so much more…