Obsidian Potency 3.0
The Real Iraq War
posted Wednesday, 17 October 2007
My friend James alerted me to this very insightful, depressing article on the state of Iraq. It was written by 12 (12!) former United States Army captains.
The picture they paint is not pretty. The infrastructure of Iraq is in far worse shape than it was pre-invasion. We are spending hundreds of billions of dollars, a large chunk of which is being stolen by the Iraqi leaders our government is trying to support. More specifically, we are spending over half a BILLION dollars PER DAY as a nation.
[To put that in perspective, two days worth of Iraq War funds is more money than Amtrak (the U.S.'s limited national passenger train service) receives in one year from the federal government. The implications for what the United States could do domestically with that kind of money are staggering. Apparently, today's Republican party believes in big government spending only as long as that money goes to fund overseas conflicts.]
The surge has simply created a "whack-a-mole" situation, where the violence simply moves to where the U.S. military presence is smaller. Worse, there is no way to sustain such a large military force indefinitely without a draft of some sort. As for the Iraqis themselves, initially they were thrilled to be free of Saddam. Now, numerous polls indicate they are completely disillusioned and want the U.S. out.
Articles like this again make me wonder what my few conservative, war-hawk friends of prior years are thinking now. The ones who claimed that they or their friends knew we were doing the right thing in being over there. The ones who either voted for W in 2000, 2004 or both. The ones who thought the Democratic candidates lacked the principle, faith and values needed to effectively make these decisions.
Have Republican politicians really proven to have more integrity than Democrats? Now that this whole Iraq endeavor has been exposed as an under-resourced, mismanaged, deteriorating cash-grabbing quagmire, do these people still think the war was a good idea? Do they still think -- among all the reports of murder, graft, corruption and suffering -- that we are doing the right thing by being there?
I'm just curious.
The picture they paint is not pretty. The infrastructure of Iraq is in far worse shape than it was pre-invasion. We are spending hundreds of billions of dollars, a large chunk of which is being stolen by the Iraqi leaders our government is trying to support. More specifically, we are spending over half a BILLION dollars PER DAY as a nation.
[To put that in perspective, two days worth of Iraq War funds is more money than Amtrak (the U.S.'s limited national passenger train service) receives in one year from the federal government. The implications for what the United States could do domestically with that kind of money are staggering. Apparently, today's Republican party believes in big government spending only as long as that money goes to fund overseas conflicts.]
The surge has simply created a "whack-a-mole" situation, where the violence simply moves to where the U.S. military presence is smaller. Worse, there is no way to sustain such a large military force indefinitely without a draft of some sort. As for the Iraqis themselves, initially they were thrilled to be free of Saddam. Now, numerous polls indicate they are completely disillusioned and want the U.S. out.
Articles like this again make me wonder what my few conservative, war-hawk friends of prior years are thinking now. The ones who claimed that they or their friends knew we were doing the right thing in being over there. The ones who either voted for W in 2000, 2004 or both. The ones who thought the Democratic candidates lacked the principle, faith and values needed to effectively make these decisions.
Have Republican politicians really proven to have more integrity than Democrats? Now that this whole Iraq endeavor has been exposed as an under-resourced, mismanaged, deteriorating cash-grabbing quagmire, do these people still think the war was a good idea? Do they still think -- among all the reports of murder, graft, corruption and suffering -- that we are doing the right thing by being there?
I'm just curious.
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