Iraq

So, future self, there's no propaganda here, just a note about how it is now. The war is the lead item on every newscast. Since the election the Democrats have been emboldened to fight with Bush about the war, and there are big protests (again) today about bringing troops home.

The enemy also has a new tactic - they just showed up at an American base wearing American uniforms and speaking English and they grab soldiers, take them off and kill them.

The mood seems to be that of resignation. No one but Bush and his cronies are talking about winning (in terms of defeating al-Queda) any more; now it's about how to turn this mess over to the Iraqis, who are locked in civil war.

So there are no good options. I think that the war was a crime and an abomination and Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz/Chalabi should be tried and imprisoned for what they did to get us to this place. I have given up on the Catholic church for some of the stuff they did around this war, as well as blowing off friends I really cared about because I just can't accept their enthusiastic approval of what we're doing. I'm too old and fat and defective to fight so I never joined the service and can't be part of that conversation.

That said, for whatever reasons, the fact is that we invaded that country and destroyed its government. We dawdled and mismanaged and allowed the forces of chaos to sprout there. If we just leave, or talk about leaving to the point where everyone just assumes we're going to leave, we leave the civilians - the ones the peace protestors claim to be so concerned about - to the tender mercies of people like those who ran the torture house discovered by the MN NG. A lot of Iraqis have put their lives on the line - literally their lives - to help us and if we disengage and leave them, well, "The Killing Fields" pretty much summed the next part of that story up.

We are not obligated to keep putting brave kids in the meat grinder for an incompetent execution of a war based on a lie. But we are morally obligated to take responsibility for what we did, what we created over there and I'm getting worried that a lot of the perennial peace organizations are making hay with the "Out Now!" line to promulgate their own influence without concern or regard for the situation for the people we were ostensibly saving.

I don't know how it will turn out. I hope we find a way, either with our military or someone else's help, to stablize the country and give those people their lives back without creating an al-Queda state, an Iranian satellite or Taliban Afghanistan with easy access to the oil fields.

Another note for you - the yellow ribbons are gone from all the SUVs now and have been for a long time. They started disappearing around the time of Abu Ghraib. There's a poem Mark Bowden reprinted in his Black Hawk Down series, go find it.

What happened, future self? How did we get out of this one? Whichever way it went down, we should be ashamed, and the people who should be most ashamed are likely to feel no shame at all. They never do. Maybe it's how they get to be those kind of people in the first place.