America Sleeps
Young Americans continue to enlist and ship off for a tour (or more) in Iraq. Young Americans continue to die or have some of their body parts blown away. The severely wounded and the dead come home and nothing happens. No one stands up and says enough!
John McCain has warned us that to leave Iraq now will mean a victory for “al Qaeda in Iraq” and near certain havoc in American streets. But neither John McCain nor anyone in the Bush Administration has a clue how to successfully end the war. So we keep doing the same things. The spin-meisters are telling us it is Iran who is causing the big problems now. If only Iran would keep its secret arms suppliers in check, Iraq would be peaceful.
You wonder what these military and Administration people are thinking. Iraq is a country that has never known democracy and most of its people have been dirt poor since the Babylonians. Hussein used ruthless measures to keep the Kurds, Sunnis, and Shiites in check, and he kept the oil profits for himself. Now most of the background unrest in Iraq centers on how to get the most benefit from the oil. Shiites are fighting amongst themselves for the biggest share, the Kurds are quietly consolidating their position and keeping the Iraqi central Government fractured. The Sunnis inherantly have less oil given where they live, but they have powerful friends in Syria and Saudi Arabia. “Al Qaeda in Iraq” is a nusence rather than a real threat.
American foreign policy, of course, missed the real problem in the Middle East when it decided to pick on Iraq. Bush and friends have now committed the bulk of US Forces to a war that can not be won while the police action in Afghanistan goes undermanned and the options open to dealing with Iran’s behaviors are severely limited.
The greatest risk is that America, as a whole, is sleeping and seems to think this will take care of itself. For sure both Democratic Presidential candidates have promised to bring the troops home but there will be screams from the right when that happens. Without a clear redefinition of American Middle East policy, when the slightest hiccup occurs, the next President may pause. Instead the American people must come to grips with the unpleasant fact that their Government has screwed up royally and squander America’s precious capital of lives, reputation, money, and time. America must wake up if we are to learn and have a chance of not repeating this insane behavior again.
May 5, 2008 at 10:25 am
I think it’s not that America sleeps. It’s that some rightists, particularly those in the government, is sick with superman syndrome - a variation of the so-called messianic complex. In the first place, why should America meddle in the affairs of other states? Because John Doone said no man is an island so it has given itself the right to plunge in any affairs not its own? Or because lately, America has been attacked by terrorists so it needs to retaliate? If so, isn’t it that America is the “bastion of democracy”? And isn’t it that in democracy there is a rule of law? So why use military might rather than use the rule of law? Unless the rule of law has been amended to read as the enforcement of military might.
Hmmnnnn. Just some thoughts.
May 5, 2008 at 11:27 am
J.A.C., thanks for the thoughts… when you have a ship with no rudder (and for sure no moral rudder), the ship can fall under the influence of many forces such as winds, tides, and currents… The American “ship of state” has been rudderless since 2000 and we have the evidence to show that. “I’ve got political capital”, the swager post Iraq invasion, and the “So” (of Dick Cheney) are all part of it…. Hurray January 20, 2009.