The War

Yes, yes, Bushie got a shoe thrown at him. Very funny, but not the point here, it is merely one leaf on a very large tree.

Let’s be honest, this was a mistake, even Bush has admitted that intel on Iraq could have been better, which is about the best you’re going to get out of him. We should never have gone there, never have invaded, never have had anything to do with them. They were of no threat to us, and it turns out that Saddam actually held that country together a whole helluva lot better than democracy has.

It’s time we all be honest, I’m sick of the fairy tale books we all try to live in. Some times tyranny is the best way to govern a people. It’s as simple as that. We love what freedom we have, but the real reason we love that freedom, and the illusions that go along with it, is because our collective national identity relishes in the history of fighting for those freedoms.

Our forefathers earned the country that is America by fighting against what they saw as tyranny. We had help yes, from (gasp!) France, but France did not do it for us. Do you really think if France had decided to free the people of the colonies that 1) they would have given us democracy rather than claim us as their own or 2) that we would truly appreciate it? We would not.

Think of it this way, take two teenagers, give one a brand new sportscar, give the other a job over the summer to buy an old car of his choosing. Who respects their car more? The one who worked for it, always. If you don’t work for it, earn it in some way then you never really appreciate the rewards. Does sleep itself not seem all the more sweet after a day of really hard manual labor?

What’s worse in the article linked above the commenters are enough to drive one crazy. One says they don’t like to see the American flag burning and they want our nation to be respected. That’s just idiotic. It’s a piece of cloth in a recognized pattern, to try to make it anything more is purely silly.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the ideals that America was built on, no matter how far removed from those ideals we may be today. But a flag is just a flag, a name just a name, and an object is truly nothing more than an object.

It’s not the wedding ring that makes a marriage, it’s the love and commitment of the two people. The ring is only a symbol. Without the love and commitment the ring is just a trinket, without the ring the love and commitment can flourish nonetheless. So goes the flag, without it, without the name of America would the ideals not be the same?

If others want to burn it then so be it. It’s not like they did it here in front of you, they did it in their own country, if you hate it that bad go buy an Iraqi flag and start a bonfire, knock yourself out. But stop acting like we don’t deserve the disrespect of it. We do, and if you can’t see that then you really should meet a friend of mine by the name of reality.

We barged into a country unasked, took over the place, and tried to make them live by our rules. All the while saying we’re doing it for their freedom and our protection?

Sounds to me a lot like we’re doing the very thing we’re afraid of. We’ve become what we hate, we’ve become that which our foundation was meant to squash. What we’re doing is little more than active societal eugenics. Killing off the ugly parts we don’t like and trying our damnedest to make others look like us. But they don’t want to be us, and I don’t blame them, I don’t want to be them either. They’re them, we’re us, and while we should respect one another, we should not inflict our cultures on one another.

I’m sorry but it’s time to go. We’ve spent $350 billion plus, tens of thousands of lives have been lost, young men and women who have no real say in the policy that we enforce are dying for those policies, we weren’t invited, we don’t want to be there, they don’t want us there, get the fuck out. Why is this so hard?

Leave it in shambles if that’s what it takes, it’s what’s going to happen anyway until one sect gains enough power to instill their own tyranny and we’ll be right back where we started. Except we’ll be in a depression and have a lot less young lives looking forward to the world ahead. All those lives, all that money, all those resources lost. How many hungry could have been fed, how many homeless housed, how many new jobs, how much better could the world truly be if we had left years ago, or not gone in at all?

And we need to face facts, that area is not ready for peaceful democracy, for whatever reason. It’s not that they’re not good enough, or not capable, they’re just not ready. It’s like many countries in Africa that are war torn cycling thru one revolution after another. They have to figure it out on their own, in their own way, in their own time. It’s the only way it has ever worked in all of humanity.

We have to come home, and we have to stop fooling ourselves, no one has won here, not the Iraqis and certainly not us.