Some self-appointed wag sent me an email noting that jobs were opening up every day in places like Saudi Arabia and Iraq. Excitement and high pay.
It got me to thinking about the current situation over there. I don't usually use this forum to get political, but I cannot help noticing the big sucking sound coming from Iraq. I cannot figure out if it is the whoosh of US taxpayer dollars being piped into the desert to make us safe from Osama Bin Laden, or whether it is the sound of the Iraqi Governing Council trying to get the hell out of Dodge before the world learns that when you hand democracy to theocrats you get totalitarianism.
In "The Fog of War" Robert MacNamara admits that big mistakes were made during the "Cold War" and Viet Nam, and most of them were because of bad intelligence and the failure to understand the motivation of the enemy. We didn't realize that North Vietnam would never be an ally of China - they had been at war for centuries. They did not want ANY occupying power. Castro had advised Kruschev to go ahead and launch the missiles on the US expecting that Cuba would have been vaporized in retaliation.
There seems to be a general feeling of doom about the future of Iraq. Everyone remembers the pictures of US troops evacuating Saigon which we should recall was followed by the killings of millions in Nam and Cambodia. As soon as we leave Iraq there will be a bloodbath. Those suspected of conspiring with America will be killed or run out of town. In the end, we have not accomplished anything, except to ruin our own economy, bleed our resources, give comfort and hope to our enemies and erode the trust and good will of our allies.
An expensive venture indeed.
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