September 28, 2004
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Ok, I'm blogging.
There must be some material in Bush's foriegn policy and war legacy for a good satirist. Something that compares Bush's compulsion to invade Iraq and a teenager's drive for sex. A clever comic should be able to do something with this. Something like: Bush's war experience is like the teenager who succeeds in his pursuit of sex only to hear the words, "I think I'm pregnant". A permanent reminder of a temporary emotion. Humor is good in most situations, maybe not this one.
We are in a mess of historic proportions in Iraq and its hard to imagine either candidate being able to lead us to a resolution that is not similar to the Vietnam solution; pull out and let the chips fall where they may. A terrible waste. In 10 years it may be difficult to discern if the status of the world, the region, or even the country of Iraq is better as a result of deposing Hussein. History will never know how Iraq would have evolved. An early death of Saddam may have seen an uprising against his brutal sons. After all, a dictator is a complex person who often only holds his grip through the thinnest threads. History shows that many dictatorships fall apart through subsequent generations. Speculating on what could have been is pointless, I suppose. This is the delema that we have created for ourselves; we are now responsible for the future of Iraq and its people. We have interceded in the progression of this country's social and political evolution and no matter what happens we will be accountable. I am convinced that eventually our only choice will be to pull out and let the people of Iraq attain their own equillibrium. We have imparted change on the course of history, but only time will determine if it was a net gain or loss. There is little support from the other observers or people directly involved who can also speak without bias, for the position of Bush's White House that the democratic elections can actually happen with any scale of validity. I think the only possible hope for attaining a stable, responsible central government within Iraq is to develop a strong, broad international coalition (not the trivial puppets that Bush likes to tout) that can be accept by the majority of Iraqies as a legitimate peace keeping, nuetral force. I don't see Bush as being able to pull this off. Who knows what Kerry would be able to do.
In conclusion I will be inconclusive. However, I am not running for President.
Comments (4)
I don't have faith in any one person to sort out this mess.
Big nations have plenty of historical precedent (and imperative) for strong-arming their way into other nations' affairs, whether for reasons political, military, fiscal, humanitarian or all of the above. My own opinion is that the world needs to be done with that model. The world needs to recognize the sovereignty of independent nations to create, destroy, remake and just plain conduct their own affairs in their own way. That said, obviously some conduct would be deletarious to other nations (e.g. if there really had been weapons of mass destruction), not to mention disenfranchized nations-within-nations (e.g. the Kurds).
It's not an easy answer, and it's too facile to claim that Bush tried to answer it easily by throwing our weight around. But he didn't answer it properly either, in my opinion. YES to us having taken on this burden of proof. And NO to us continuing in that vein.
P.S. By "YES, etc." I meant that you summed it up well, that we took on the burden of proving ourselves correct -- NOT that we should have done so. (so it goes when trying to conduct phone business while also commenting
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I believe we should just get the hell out of Iraq and out of all those other places that don't appreciate democracy and equality....if they want to take hostages, behead people, shoot bystanders, blow up innocent people....they should be doing it without endangering any of our troops.
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