We liberals get a little hinky over Saddam you understand.

Yeah, he was a despicable, evil tyrant and really did deserve to taste his own blood prior to his mortal coil being yanked.  Yep, all of the above.   But he didn’t have fuck all to do with 911 so how did he become our problem?  Our responsibility?

Fine.  We drug him out of a hole and let his own people hang him.  All on television. Bonus.  I guess.  We had better reason to do that than break the entire goddamn country and now the entire sonafabitching region.  See, we liberals understand that it did not a single human being anywhere, any good at all.  None.  What happened, because of what we did, was way worse than if we’d done nothing whatsoever.  Hussein lacked the brute,  efficient capacity to kill as and ruin as many innocent, civilian Iraqis as we came to kill and ruin.  Millions of them.  The United States of America, in your name and mine, made Saddam Hussein look positively Fisher Price for no reason at all.

How come we did that?

It was in fact, deliberate, with hubris, stupidity and greed, as it’s impetus.  What I mean is, that it was precipitated by arrogant, greedy bastards with no concern whatsoever for the inevitable consequences.  Obvious consequences.  Dumbya’s daddy wrote in his own memoir what a mistake it would be and why.  Darth fucking Cheney spoke publicly about why we shouldn’t and what would happen if we did.  And it all came to pass.  All of it and worse, although the entrance was grand.  You remember, “Shock And Awe”?  How ninth grade was that?

I’m an agnostic, but I’d stick a red hot spit up Cheney’s ass and roast the dirty prick for all eternity if I could. Dumbsfeld too.  As far as Dumbya, well, you can’t fix stupid.

And now, nine years after the fact, and still in Afghanistan, having traded Generals but not policies, our definition of success is the same nebulous bullshit proffered in Iraq.  There is no analogue for success or victory.  The “We’ll stand down when they’re able to stand up” doctrine.   The most powerful military in the world fighting an enemy that doesn’t have tanks, planes, ships or even an army.  We are not fighting for our nation’s survival. We can leave, literally, anytime we want.

So why don’t we?

Why are we there?  Killing and being killed?  Why?

Silly, if it weren’t so achingly tragic.  Certainly no comedy for those who would dwell exclusively among numbers and projections.  An unmitigated horror for those of us in possession of both heart and mind.

Why?  Why are we there?  Someone please enlighten me.  We have thus far done nothing but make everything worse.  By almost every account, there is barely any Al Qaeda presence at all in Afghanistan.  True to form, we’re bombing the shit out of everybody regardless of affiliation, as in not Al Qaeda, while they, again not Al Qaeda, are still killing our fine young men and women every day.

So now, the very same General in charge as was in Iraq.   Credited with turning the whole thing around in Iraq with the “surge”.  Understand it had less to do if anything at all with that.  No, the phenomena was known as the Sunni/Anbar “Awakening”.

The “surge” was a pile of horseshit.

“The turnabout began last September [2006], when a federation of tribes in the Ramadi area came together as the Anbar Salvation Council to oppose the fundamentalist militants of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.” -NYT April, 2007

The “surge” wasn’t even icing on the shit cake, not even a cherry.  That sounds pretty cynical for sure, but what most don’t know is that we had begun to pay 80,000 Sunni members of that “Awakening”, $10 each a day not to fight us.  That right. That’s an ass pocket of cash to anyone in Iraq.  $800,000 a day we were paying them to not kill us.  You got it. Read it again.  The serendipitousness of the surge was merely that.  If not for the Sunni’s getting their brave and pissed off on, along with us paying them to leave us out of it, we’d still be there.  Killing and being killed.

Oh, sorry, we still are.  There.  Why is that?

And what kind of shithole is Iraq now and why isn’t it on the news?  Contemporary Iraq is best case scenario for Afghanistan and we won’t even come close to pulling that off.  We still have as many as 90,000 troops there. Bombs going off everyday.  Turkey enjoys killing Kurds freestyle.  Recent elections most likely a joke.  No doctors or professionals left in the country.  Poverty, disease above and availability of services including fresh water and electricity far below pre-war levels.  Was it Powell who warned that if you “break it, you buy it”?

Now, let’s talk about blood and treasure willingly spent by our government.   Over $10 billion a month.  At least as many private security contractors as troops, half remunerated with our tax dollars at six figures a year or better.  I’m sure closer to $20 billion a month between the two countries.  How many dead? Not just ours but theirs?  How many?  Don’t know do ya?   If it’s anything like Iraq, the ratio is shameful.  We wonder why they hate us.

And we are gonna screw this pooch way harder than we did Iraq.

Mr. Obama, you are rapidly becoming merely the lesser of two evils because of this outrageous agglomeration.  That is to say, I’m glad it’s not McCain/Palin handling it, but I’m beginning to have trouble making a distinction.  Enough is enough.  The problems we could solve here at home with the the blood and money we spill abroad……..

So Barack, this is human tragedy on a scale that does not belong in this century and I know you’re too smart not to know it.  Americans are far more likely to die of a goddamn bee sting than a terrorist attack.   The “terrorists” have proven themselves to be astonishingly incompetent.  It’s all a lie, and you sir, are abundantly cognizant of that.  Remember, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself”?  Truer words have never been spoken.  C’mon, the shoe bomber?  The Underwear bomber?   The war on terror is as big a bullshit facade as the war on drugs.  What gives?  What are you doing?

You sir, are beginning to appear deliberately venal in the prosecution of this war.  Somebody is getting filthy rich but it sure as hell isn’t the people you were elected to look out for.

I supported you.  I believed in you.  I’m a Democrat.  A progressive.  A patriot.  We both know that the last justifiable war we participated in was WWII and that was over sixty years ago.

We both know that every war since then has been about sending the poor and less advantaged to die defending the interests of the rich.  We both know that’s what war is and always has been.

I’m not happy with the direction or scope of health care, financial reforms and a myriad of other things, but it is here, on this issue that you are losing me.  Soon, I and so many like me, will throw up our hands and resign ourselves to the ranks of the disenfranchised and disaffected.  We will stop caring.

You want to shake shit up?  You want change?  This right here is the best place to start.  End it.  Now.  Bring our people home and bring our money and resources to bear on what we really need.   The homeless.  The able and willing but still unemployed.  Our rapidly decaying infrastructure.  45,000 a year dying for lack of health care.  People losing their homes and their lives.  Our crumbling joke of an education system.  All these things we so desperately need and deserve, so easily solved by ending this utter nonsense that you could not give me a plausible reason for were you able to share a beer with me across a kitchen table, because we both know there isn’t one.

Not a reason, and soon not a beer or a kitchen table.

Our people Mr. Obama, our country, our swiftly vanishing pride.

I understand you didn’t start it, despite what that useless goofcock Michael Steele said, but you sure as hell can finish it.  Not next year, not five or ten years from now, but now.  Right now.

I don’t know whether to feel more sorry for the American families losing fathers, mothers, brothers and sisters or the tens of thousand returning home broken, shattered, both mentally and physically.

Know what’s gonna happen?  It’s all building up to something.  Something that can only end in fire.  This obtuse and utterly senseless course we pursue will likely end with all the mountains and all the sand and all the people, vaporized into glass.  Nuclear war.  Thousands of years from now, bits of them will be discovered preserved, like insects in amber.  Jews, Muslims, Palestinians and millions of secularists who never had a dog in this fight, or worse, didn’t until we pushed it to the brink.  That’s what’s going to happen.

It’s inevitable.  What scares and disgusts me Mr. Obama, is you know it too.

Drinks for my friends.

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