I'm Not So Sure About That

I'm with you on the Spanish American War and World War I, but I'm not so sure about Desert Storm and the Civil War.

Granted, it turned out that taking out Saddam didn't solve anything, but that's hindsight. At the time, a lot of people wondered why Bush I didn't finish the job while we were there. I believed that it was because the United Nations was involved. Ever since Korea, any war that involves the UN never seems to be really finished. As soon as the good guys start winning, the U.N. calls a cease fire, insuring that the bad guys will live to fight another day. At the time, I thought it was for the best that Bush II couldn't talk the U.N. into the second Iraq war, but it didn't do him a lot of good in the long run. Looking back on it, I doubt that there is anything that can be done about Iraq and much of the rest of the Middle East. Those people have been like that since forever, and I don't see any effective way to rehabilitate them. If it wasn't for Israel, I would abandon the Middle East and tell them to shove their oil up their ass.

We wouldn't need their oil if we would keep all the oil we have in the U.S. and not export any of it to anybody. I feel compelled to part company with my esteemed Republican colleagues on that Keystone Pipeline. What we really need is a pipeline going east and west, because most of our oil is in the West while most of our people are in the East. Keystone will just transport oil from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, where it will be loaded on tankers and shipped out of the country. I'm not against exporting anything of which we have a surplus like wheat, but anything we need here should stay here. I know this sounds contrary to the laissez faire theory, but we shouldn't need to pass laws about this, the producers should just do it out of the goodness of their hearts for the benefit of their native land. Of course they won't, but they should.

Of course the Civil War was about slavery, but they had been arguing about slavery for something like four score and seven years. It was only when the Southern states seceded that the shooting began. Well, that's not exactly true. There were some minor skirmishes leading up to the war, but those were mostly hot heads acting on their own. Of course the South wouldn't have seceded if Lincoln hadn't been elected so yeah, it was mostly about slavery.

I still don't understand why the framers of the Constitution didn't put something in there saying that states either could or could not secede. It may be because they didn't think the Constitution was going to last that long. I believe it was Jefferson who predicted that they  would be holding another convention and having a do-over in about 20 years. If that had happened, I suppose they wouldn't have had to worry about secession, any state that didn't like the old union could have just refrained from joining the new one.  

I remember when we first studied American history in school, I asked the teacher why it was okay for the Colonies to secede from the British Empire but it was not okay for the South to secede from the North. She said it was because slavery was an evil institution that needed to be abolished. While that is true as far as it goes, she also should have added that the Colonies won their war while the South lost theirs. When all is said and done, it still comes down to that: "The victors write the history books."