You know – I honestly don’t know whether we need to:
(a) get all of our troops out of Iraq,
(b) increase the number of troops in Iraq beyond the pissant surge so that we can make a real difference, or
(c) follow a third way, i.e. the Iraq Study Group recommendations or something else.
All I know is that we need someone else to make the decisions. If we had a completely different president, someone thoughtful and responsible and open-minded, and that president said that we need to stay in Iraq for the longer term, I might be more inclined to believe it.
Because the main issue is really a meta-issue. It’s no longer about what needs to be done — it’s about having the right person in place to make those decisions. This administration is completely through; it hasn’t an ounce of credibility left; we have a president who doesn’t even understand the war HE HIMSELF started, a president who spouts nonsense every time he opens his mouth.
And we still have 557 days of this crap to go.
It’s times like this that a parliamentary system looks really good.
Seriously, though – here’s the thing. I’m not a foreign affairs expert. None of my friends who blog are foreign affairs experts, either. None of us knows what to do about Iraq. We’ve all got opinions and emotions, and we express them, which is our right. But none of us really knows what to do. That’s why we elect a president to make those decisions for us.
If you’re a good president, or jeez, even a halfway decent president, you make those decisions by starting without preconceived notions, without hubris, without thinking that you’re a messenger of God and therefore better than other people; you gather all the top experts you can, and you listen to them all, and then you listen to them again; you realize that the world is a complicated place and it’s not us vs. them.
There used to be a lot more monarchs in the world. Rulerships passed down by heredity. You could never be sure who you might get stuck with; a great king might have a dolt of an eldest son and then you’d be stuck with him for the next 30 years. So I bet there used to be a lot more stupid wars then there are now.
But we live under a constitution that was supposed to prevent things like that from happening anymore.
Granted, we’ve had some lame presidents in the past, presidents who were incapable or parochial. It’s not just the modern media’s fault; in fact, people are (one hopes) much better informed today than they were in the days where you could buy votes by handing out whiskey and pretending that your candidate grew up in a log cabin.
Still, Bush was elected not once but twice (okay, maybe legitimately just once; because Theresa LePore designed a stupid ballot, almost 4,000 U.S. soldiers have died in Iraq and the Middle East is the biggest hellhole it’s been in years; if a butterfly ballot flaps its wings…). There are still tons of people who still think Saddam had something to do with 9/11.
People are still people, and lots of them either aren’t smart enough, just don’t know how to think, or are too busy to pay attention. Unfortunately they’re not too busy to vote.
I don’t know where I’m going with this. I guess I’m just ranting.
But God I hope things get better.
Well, you forgot one point: most presdents don’t surround themselves with only like-minded toadies all hellbent on one goal and one goal only…and, further, they don’t put up as Secretary of State a person whom they completely ignore but hope to use as a cash cow of goodwill and them replace him with a secretary whose only political expertise is the theories of Russian Cold War politics and then subjugate all secretaries to the control of a person whom the Devil himself likely fears just a bit.
Then, when you start said “legitimate” war, you don’t blow your smokescreen by dropping that war 5 minutes after it started to go after the lucrative oil and reconstruction contracts, completely allowing the real terrorists to crawl over the numerous porous borders in the Middle East and reform.
I mean, that’s just a thought.
You know what? We are completely fucked.
If we stay, we fuck things up further. If we pull out, we leave the region even more in shambles than it already was.
But there really is no “If we pull out . . .”
We’re there. Our military engagement is likely to last the remainder of this presidency, at the very least.
What’s really sad is that even though the reign of George The Second will end 557 days, the damage he has done to our standing in the world will go far beyond that..
What makes this situation so intolerable is beacuse we’re nominally a republic, which means that we, the people are responsible for what the government does. This war is being fought in our name whether we like it or not.
But we still can’t do anything about it.
At least if we were living under an absolute monarchy or a dictatorship where the King or Leader or what-have-you was answerable to no one but himself, it wouldn’t be so bad.
We still wouldn’t be able to do anything, but we wouldn’t have to share the blame.
Oh, what the hell. We’re already well on our way to monarchy as it is. The President of the United States is pretty much now an Emperor with term-limits. We’re like the Roman Republic in the 60’s and 50’s BCE. We’re just waiting for our Caesar.