The unapalatable but unavoidable shit stew that is The War in Iraq

It's hard to write about politics without writing about the war in Iraq. But I find it pretty damn hard to write anything intelligent about the war. The way I see it, Iraq is like a stew someone else started cooking. The Chef in every little last bit of food we have left, so we have to eat it. Even though he shit in it. Makes it kind of hard to swallow.

The worst part is, the Republicans bent over and dropped one into the stew years ago. So there's no point in trying to fish it out and pretending it never happened. We can throw in as much oregano as we want, but the fact is, there's shit in there, no amount of condiments is going to stop it from poisoning us. The Democrats want to throw the stew into the toilet, flush it away and pretend it never happened. Which I'm inclined to agree with, since I'm not a fan of shit-eating, but we don't have any food left, so throwing it out isn't much of an option. I'm also more than a little bothered by the Dems belief that we'll forget they were Bush and Dick's eager little sous-chefs from the beginning. Now they're saying it's the Chef's fault the stew is so rank. A little late for that, don't you think boys? Seems like they went along because they were too scared to do anything about it at the time, and calculated they might be able to use it to their political advantage in the future.

I could go on, and on, about how criminally negligent the Democrats have been over the last 7 (or 40) years. But suffice it to say, anyone who cared to read a newspaper published outside of the United States in 2001 and 2002 would have known that all of the "evidence" this government put forward in it's attempt to prove Iraq had weapons of mass destruction - from the aluminum tubes, to the yellow cake, to the "mobile labs" - was demonstrably false and questioned BY OUR OWN INTELLIGENCE. Any legislator who says he was "tricked" into authorizing the war is either lying or a total incompetent. And anyone who says we did it for humanitarian reasons is so unbelievably full of shit he doesn't deserve to get anywhere near the kitchen. (For an incisive history of Western involvement in Iraq, read Web of Deceit by Barry Lando. http://barrylando.com/?page_id=20)

Back to the point at hand. We have a massive amount of troops in Iraq. Iraq is in the middle of a civil war, being fought by disparate groups, most of them with competing local agendas, some with grand international visions of a Sunni umma that will destroy, or at least continually harass the West. We currently fund and arm many of these competing groups. As does Iran. The current Iraqi government is beholden to Iran; it is furious about our relatively newfound allegiance with (and funding and arming of) Sunni warlords; and it's troops and police are infested with Mahdi militiamen who kill Shiite's whenever they get the chance. Violence has been down in the last few months - not surprising, given the addition of an (unsustainable) military surge. And that's nice, unless you remember more American troops have been killed this year than any other. And it's pretty clear now that"political reconciliation" ain't gonna happen in this generation.

Fighting a war in Iraq does not, and cannot ever, stop terrorist attacks in our country. The only connection between Iraq and domestic terrorist attacks is this: we gave terrorist groups a better recruiting tool than Osama could have ever dreamed of. People used to talk about "fixing" the situation in Palestine and Israel, thinking that would defuse much of the hatred towards us. Well, maybe. The continued occupation/strangulation of Palestine makes for an easy example in the "American aggression towards Muslims" diagram. The war in Iraq now makes that argument pretty hard to refute. We're trying to prevent terrorist attacks - an attack that any Joe Blow with nails or fertilizer AND the willingness to kill random strangers can pull off - by inventing an enemy. And then destroying him and ourselves in the process. That's tragically similar to trying to feed yourself with your own excrement.

Yeah, we need to end the war. No shit. And we the sooner the better. Kind of like pulling a band-aid off. But Iraq is in a state of militarized anarchy. And leaving means a ceding Iraq to Iran. Look at a map of the Middle East. See Saudia Arabia? Know where the oil is? On the Northern border with Iraq. Know where most of Saudi's Shiites live? You guessed it. That's part of why we were buddies with Saddam for so long. That and all the money he made for American rice growers, chemical manufacturers, and weapons manufacturers. Throwing the stew out also means destroying any tiny little shred of credibility this country has. And allowing another slaughter, only this time it will be Sunni's killing Shiite's (unlike the other slaughters we've allowed in Iraq).

So, is there anything we can add or remove from the shit stew that will make it edible? Anything at all? I don't know. I'm not sure trust any person who really thinks he or she has the answer. But we need a discussion that involves reasonable alternatives besides throwing the stew out, and continuing to shit in the stew. Wish I could think of one.