Friday, April 18, 2008

The Debacle in Iraq?

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/usiraqmilitarywar;

begin quote: WASHINGTON (AFP) - In a scathing analysis, a former senior Pentagon official has called the war in Iraq "a major debacle" that created an incubator for terrorism and emboldened Iran.


"Measured in blood and treasure, the war in Iraq has achieved the status of a major war and a major debacle," Joseph Collins wrote in "Choosing War: The Decision to Invade Iraq and its Aftermath."

Published by the National Defense University, Collins' paper is striking in that it comes from one whose position from 2001 to 2004 put him near the center of decision making that led to the war.

He was deputy assistant secretary of defense for stability operations when the United States invaded Iraq, only to find itself mired in the now five year old struggle to pacify the country.end quote

This present war in Iraq never has made any sense to me. If we were going to invade a country Iran might have made sense but Iraq? This has never made sense to me. Saddam Hussein was basically a bought and paid for US puppet and even fought the Iranians in a proxy war for about 8 years during the 1980s. When he asked the US Ambassador, a lady, what the U.S. would do if he invaded Kuwait, she said, "Nothing!" I guess Saddam thought that he deserved some slack after fighting Iran for 8 years from us because the U.S. didn't allow him to win(or the Iranians either for that matter).

No, this present war only made sense if you were Halliburton or Blackwater or some other military Daddy Warbucks corporation that benefits from a lot of unneccessary carnage by making bullets, missiles, grenades etc.

I think the last war that made any sense at all was World War II. When the Korean war happened General McArthur decided to clean house all the way into China and got fired for it. However, I think going into china would have been just as bad in the long run as what has happened in Iraq during the last almost 20 years since Desert Storm during the first Bush administration. Now, we have 300,000 walking wounded and 4000 who died in Iraq(that doesn't include those who died after leaving Iraq from wounds suffered there).

It is almost as if, starting with the Korean war that war has ONLY been about a police action. All the carnage seems to be like policemen dying to preserve the peace but nothing else. Nothing has been gained by the Korean War, the Viet Nam War, or the Iraq War. Each of these wars was a complete waste of blood and money from U.S. citizens. Possibly the only thing gained by all these wars was that we scared the hell out of the rest of the world like a really scary policeman does sort of like the good cop bad cop game played on the whole planet.

However, the planet is not as economically helpless as it was after World War II and the whole planet can fight back economically if it doesn't like what the U.S. is doing like it is right now. Because there are nuclear weapons most real warfare is done through corporations and individuals worldwide economically now. In this game the U.S. is losing the economic war. The United States needs to rethink what it is doing in this strange new world!

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