Today's Apocalypse Sign: All For A Campaign Promise

People, this may be a volatile subject to many, but I feel I need to weigh-in with my two cents worth.

I am of course talking about the "end of combat operations" in Iraq.

Up front let me clarify: I did not vote for Obama. I did not like his weak-ass stance on the way the war in Iraq was going to be handled among other things. I felt the campaign promise for setting a deadline to pull the troops out, was basically giving the people what they wanted to hear so he could get elected. There was no plan or thought on how they were really going to accomplish this. And many people forget the margin of Obama's victory was not that big.

Many have compared the Vietnam war and the Iraq war. Many others (usually in defending the Iraq war) have pointed out how dissimilar the two wars are. And while as a general principle I am not in favor of war short of literal homeland defense, if we choose to engage then we damn well need to have a plan to win. Not create billions of dollars of revenue and profits to the purveyors of war-business. Trust me when I say there will be many people sad to see the "combat mission end" in Iraq.

With all the state-of-the-art armament and munitions at our disposal all we have proven is we cannot save and convert a country that has no clue how to help itself. How to defend itself. How to govern itself. We went in and kicked a beehive and now we are leaving the innocents to fend for themselves. The bees will swarm after we leave. Do we really think we have helped establish a government, a defense force, a police force, hell, a society??

No we have not. We have played with kick-ass toys in a giant sandbox for 6 or 7 years, blown a lot of shit up, supplied the terrorists with continuing incentive to hate the hell out of us, sacrificed too many soldiers lives and now that we have totally fucked up TWO countries (can't forget Afghanistan), we are taking our toys and going home. "Good luck desert people! Your countries were shit before and we helped make them less than shit now! It's been real."

They hate us (or soon will) more than ever mainly because we had no plan.


I don't even know what happened to Saddam Hussein. Is he in prison? Alive? I really don't know.

But here we are, ending combat operations. Why? Nothing else Obama has done since he took office has gone right. The economy...sucks. Unemployment... sucks. Health care reform....sucks. Gulf Oil Spill...sucks and blows. State Dinner...crashed by unknowns. I think he has had a couple nice vacations that went rather well. In a year and a half he has done nothing. So to calm the growing unrest with his administration...he decided to pull the rug out from under the Iraqi people, bring our troops home, and declare what? Victory? A promise kept? Are you serious?? If my son or daughter had died over there I would be having a serious WTF moment right now.

Have you heard the saying that "nature abhors a vacuum"? Guess what...it does! Has no one figured out that as we leave, with no stability, something has to take our place. Iran will not be waiting for an engraved invitation. We are leaving Iraq totally defenseless. Iran and Iraq have always warred. Now I'm no Pentagon pundit but what the fuck do we think is going to happen? The "insurgents" will become the gang style-rulers of Iraq for a while and then Iran (who has no moral qualms about laying waste to Iraq) will have a plan to enlarge their country. And they WILL execute it.

By last count we have wasted 10, count 'em TEN, opportunities to take Bin Laden out. So when we got frustrated with that we figured, "Well, let's invade Iraq and take out Saddam!" We couldn't have shot more from the hip if we had been in the OK Corral. Ready. Fire. Aim was our strategy...oops! what happens after the initial Shock and Awe wears off? We were no more prepared to fight and win a desert war than we were to win a jungle war (Vietnam). Maybe the objective was never TO win.

The bottom line is, even though Bush got us into the war, we were already there. To now engage in some sort of Iraqus Interruptus and withdraw thinking that something was really accomplished is sad. It is sad for the Iraqi people, it is sad for those soldiers families whose children gave their lives, it is sad for the democracies of the world who are now looked upon with even more contempt by the Haters, and it is sad we have emboldened the Haters by failing in our mission.

Apparently though, we are going to stay and "help" the Afghan people a while longer.

Guess the war-business isn't quite over yet.