Words Like Locusts Flew From Her Fingers

Iraq’s Civil War

Achenblog: Daily Humor and Observations from Joel Achenbach
The symbolic power of the [Samarra shrine] bombing exceeds its lethality. Iraq has been a seething mess for so long it is easy for us to get innured to the latest news bulletin, and perhaps it is a purely semantic matter to argue that the country is on the verge of a civil war (as though it’s been the Era of Good Feelings up to now).

Obviously, this is one of Joel Achenbach’s non-humorous observations. If you’re not a regular reader of his column and blog in the Washington Post, you really ought to become one. For a guy who’s often extremely funny, he’s really quite smart. (As though the two were usually mutually exclusive? Maybe not.) Anyway…

We should never have invaded Iraq. We should never have taken out Saddam in the way we did. We should have left him in power and persuaded him to improve the lives of Iraqi citizens — even if it meant [gasp!] that he wouldn’t sell us any oil. It was a HUGE mistake to cut aid to Iraq before the war — it just made things worse for the average Iraqi and stirred up even more resentment for the US. Oh… people will whine “But we tried to work with Saddam and he wouldn’t cooperate!” To that I say BULLSHIT. We tried to turn Saddam into yet another Arab-lackey and he wasn’t having any. (And we wonder why many in the Arab world hate us and hate the Europeans? You think they can’t see that many of us still think of them as wogs whose assets need to be “managed”???) Listen, I’m not saying Saddam was a great guy who was just misunderstood. He was a jerk and, apparently, not a particularly good leader. (Hell, we should recognize THAT, right? We’ve got one of our own in the Oval Office!) I’m just saying that the US government pretty much screwed up every opportunity we might have had to make things go right over there.

And now… NOW Iraq’s not just headed for civil war. Let’s be brutally honest, okay?

Iraq is already IN a civil war.