Caught Between Iraq and a Hard Place

I have a suspicion that the far right hawks who want us to go back to Iraq are the very same people who also wanted us to go back to Saigon. And still do.

The far right hawks who say we should go back to Iraq because it's falling apart are same people who said there's no evidence that religious factions in Iraq can't get along.  

The only reason there is no evidence that religious factions in couldn't get along is because it's been buried under 1,400 years of fighting.  

Any day now I expect the NRA to say it's too soon to talk about civil war in Iraq.

There actually is evidence that Shias and Sunnis can get along just fine, because history shows they lived in peace and harmony after the founder of Islam, Muhammed, died in 632 AD, and it wasn't for another 48 years when his son-law was massacred with most of him family, after which peace and harmony sort of broke apart.

I'm waiting for the NRA to explain how guns make us all safer which is why we should help arm everyone in Iraq.

The good news is that after 11 years we finally found Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq.  The bad news is that it's the nation of Iraq.

The far right is saying that after 11 years we had won the war in Iraq -- but then these are the same people after two weeks who said, "Mission Accomplished ."

We won the war in Iraq much the same way we won the war in Viet Nam.  What countries do after we leave is their own business.

$2.2 trillion and 4,400 American deaths in Iraq.  Well, there was money, time and lives well spent.

If only George W. Bush had been reading My Pet Goat when the decision was being made to invade Iraq unprovoked, we could have saved a lot of money and lives.

A new study says that 500,000 Iraqis died during the Iraq War.  Unfortunately that's the good news, because it doesn't include the part of the war that's coming.

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Yes, yes, I know these are all just one-line "quips" that aren't particularly substantive on their own.  But that's why I figured it was best to put them all together.  And ultimately I felt that one-line "quips" were the best thing to write because otherwise, if you look too closely, your head might explode.  Though that's probably a bad description to use these days.

Perhaps the most galling thing about the discussion going on in that the media is that news shows and reporters are going back to the same discredited voices who not only got us involved in the Iraq War in the first place, but were wrong about pretty much everything they said from the start.  That goes back to "we'll be treated as liberators" to "we'll be greeted with candy and flowers" to "the cost of the Iraq War won't be counted in trillions, but tens of billions" to "there's lock-box solid evidence of Weapons of Mass Destruction" to George Bush's infamous 16-word lie insisting on the existence of non-existing yellowcake in Niger, and much too much more.  And these are the people we have to listen to yet again explain what's gone wrong and what to do.  Let's be clear -- they're not explaining what to do and what went wrong, they're covering their butts and trying to wipe the history slate clean.

These far right neocon voices are "experts" basically the same way that a broken clock is right twice a day.  The only difference is that a broken clock will be right twice a day.  The problem is that if enough people throw out enough words in a stream of unrelenting obfuscation, eventually others will be able to edit enough random words together where some of the public will start to listen because non-stop babel is difficult to ignore.

Yet, still the media goes to these voices, because there always has to be two sides to every discussion.  Well, in fairness, yes, there are two sides here.  Those two sides are right and wrong.

We were wrong to ever have gone into Iraq in the first place, and stay there for 11 years.  Anyway who wants to add their voice into the discourse must use not going and not staying for 11 years as the starting point, and either agree with it or explain why they disagree.

And disagreeing means you have to explain how many more years, how much more money, and how many other lost lives you think we should keep pouring into that unquenchable sinkhole.