At first we were just going to Afghanistan for vengeance, well and
to nab Osama and kick out Al Qaeda and depose the Taliban. Osama snuck out but
we achieved the second two aims by aiding the northern alliance to take over the
country and at that point we could have dusted off our mitts and got
out.
But for the neocons who had a dream of setting up a democratic free
enterprise state in Iraq which, with its peace and prosperity, would be a beacon
to all the other middle eastern states and inspire them to overthrow their nasty
governments and join the peace and prosperity league where they would be so
happy that they would forget all their grievances with Israel, and it wouldn’t
even cost anything because they would be so happy that they would pay us back
for our trouble from their oil revenues.
But the American public wouldn’t buy that, so they came up with
weapons of mass destruction because fear always sells well with the American
public. They cherry picked facts and made up a bunch of stuff and got the
country fired up and off to Iraq we went bands beating and flags waving, and
overthrowing Saddam was a piece o’ cake, but plans after that were sketchy and
it turned out, contrary to everything the neocons had predicted (I seem to
remember the strewing of rose petals) it turned out that the Iraqis didn’t like
being conquered.
The war went badly and then the surge and the Sunni awakening and
it was going better, but it still wasn’t all that good and you could tell it was
never going to get any better, and we basically snuck out. We sort of wanted to
keep some troops in, but the Iraqis didn’t like that so we withdrew them all,
and now that things have really gone to hell there McCain and his ilk are
claiming we should have left troops there and I have to wonder to do what, take
Fallujah again?
Meanwhile in Afghanistan, Obama, who turned out not to be the
peacenik we peaceniks thought he would be, for reasons I don’t understand, I
suspect he thought he could get away with some quick victory, double downed in
Afghanistan which hasn’t worked out well at all, and now we are sneaking out of
there, but for some fuzzy reason we also want to leave troops
there.
The funny thing about fundamentalists is that they always want to
go back to someplace that has never been. What the fundamental Christians want
to do has nothing in common with the early Christians. And I suspect the same
with the muslim fundamentalists. In the feudal days we were the barbarians and
the muslims were sophisticated and appalled at our ways. Their city states were
all somewhat hostile to each other and wouldn’t aid their neighbors when the
crusaders came knocking, and sometimes they hated their neighbors so much that
they would help the crusaders.
When it came to taking Jerusalem they assumed
that some kind of deal could be made that reasonable people could agree with,
but it turned out that we were not reasonable people, we were believers who were
not afraid to die, much like the present day muslim terrorist we so decry these
days.
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