Thoughts on Iraq again.
It seems the US death toll for Iraq has hit 4,000. Read here. I don't know how I missed the 3,000 mark but I don't remember it. Maybe I did at the time and made a comment. Old age settling in clearly.However, it made me think a bit more about Iraq. We get conflicting news from there on a daily basis from our media. It sounds like the back is broken as the attacks by the insurgents fall off, then it sounds like a new surge is on the way. Not long ago it made is sound like a rare event that would soon run out of steam yet it now seems it is a regular occurrence and is something like the tides. They recede and then they surge in. Each one triggers surprise and a new round of pats on the back or grimaces depending on which part of the cycle we are on.
I was never a supporter of the invasion nor did I believe for a moment the reasons given for the invasion. Something that I think we need to look at with a view to punishing the guilty. It seems government policy to apologise for things they have not done and yet they do not stand up and admit the things they have done. Does that make any sense?
The US is asking for a full investigation of China and Tibet. Why are people not calling for a full investigation into the Iraqi invasion? More people have died and the culprits are still at large. China will be forced by it's own progress into compromises with Tibet and, in the not too distant future, Tibet will be a footnote in history. Iraq on the other hand is going to be made a footnote in history by the might of the winners rewriting history when it has hit two of the milestones for WWII, length and cost, although thankfully not lives lost in battle. Although let us not feel complacent as it does not appear to be any closer to a finish.
Like most things in life I find the questions being asked by our leaders to be next to useless. They seem quite happy to just allow us to continue down a path we prepared many years before. One that has proven to be ineffective and yet we don't seem to revisit it and reevaluate the situation. The politicians know that being protected 24/7 they are unlikely to be targeted and thus have little concern for what is going on. Being much too busy with an expose of their noses in the trough whilst our brave men and women die.
The question is what to do? Many argue that to leave Iraq would send a clear message to the baddies that they have won and that terrorism works. They say it would also mean that they bring their fight to us. Perhaps they are right. However they were wrong about how this was going to work so why should they be right this time? Insurgents fighting in Iraq are not going to find that the techniques work here in the UK or the US and we may have a few terrorist attacks similar to the tube bombings but the chances are that this will happen anyway whilst we are still in Iraq in the current politician climate as the original tube bombings were.
The situation is that despite our feelings of who was right and who was wrong people are dying while the situation in Iraq shows no real improvement. It even seems that they are changing their tack to an attack on democracy and are mainly targeting Iraqi's. As a process introduced by the infidel it is tainted beyond redemption and I cannot see democracy working there unless we commit to spill the blood of our soldiers for a long, long time to come.
Is it not time we looked at the situation and revisited what we can and should do. I'm sure knowing what we know now. Which is even after all this time we do not understand these people we could come up with a better way of doing things. Even if it means picking our troops and support staff, including Iraqis, and coming home. They will never have the infrastructure to fight us here and the money spent on the war can be better spent on repairing the damage we have done to our nations after we went against international laws. It would probably be cheaper to just supply funds to Iraq to provide them a viable infrastructure and get them back to normal. Of course it won't be long before someone rises to power who we won't like. That is inevitable. The history of the middle east is full of this.
The only winner out of all of this is Iran. No matter what we do Iran will have a rallying cry. If we remain it will be 'We need to free our countries' and if we leave it will be 'We defeated them in Iraq'. The real loser here is our western values which have shown that we don't actually follow the rules we dictate that the world follows' The Geneva convention, human right, rule of law. All these, and more, have been pushed aside at our whim whilst we pursued our agenda.
So, stay and fight for at least a decade to introduce democracy in a single country in the middle east in the hope that the others will just decide that they will take it on as well.
Alternatively we can just nuke them back to the stone age... ooops... that's where they are starting from so even further back than that. And when we look at nuking them we need to just do the whole lot at once. No point in waiting for each one to go through the same process.
Or we can just leave them to get on with it knowing the internal turmoil will eventually settle. Someone will rise to dominate and we can then
My favourite though would be to select a leader, obviously by democratic means, *snigger*, we seem to have practise lately. Then give them our weapons and supply intelligence from satellite etc. so they can
Personally I wish we could just build a wall around all these backwards countries and just buy the goods, in this case oil, through agreed holes in those walls. We can pass them shiny baubles and gold through as payment although if we really wanted to do ourselves some goods we would airdrop guns and ammunition free of charge. It goes without saying we would drop Blair et al after the place was sealed off.
The reasoning behind that is one day these people are going to come bubbling up from their shacks and come to take us on. They didn't like us in the first place and we have made that a lot worse by this invasion and it will take a lot of blood to resolve the issue. I think that it should not be the blood of my grandchildren. They will hate us for generations and we are not doing a thing to stop it. They see our attempts to help them as a sign of weakness. Why should we ponce about following our self imposed queensbury type rules whilst they infiltrate our society and weaken our already corrupt core.
What a mess. I'm open for other suggestions. Or even someone saying that all is going well. I hope my understanding is way off the mark but why should our government's handling of Iraq be OK whilst everything else they touch just fall apart.
posted by Bag @ 1:37 pm
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