Sunday, October 23, 2005

The Mad Beast

There is this:
Lt. Colonel Haitham Akram was driving his two young sons in his own car when a bomb hidden on the roadside blasted the vehicle at 8 a.m., engulfing it in flames.... Another car parked nearby also burned, killing two girls aged 7 and 9,....

A short time later, another roadside bomb exploded in Tikrit near a car carrying children to school, wounding three... (emphasis added)
For a while, I agreed with Juan Cole and was against immediate withdrawal from Iraq. Recently, he has changed. So have I. We don't have any choice. We must get out. Our presence does nothing but fuel the insurgency which, like a mad beast, is feeding on the lives of its own children.

4 comments:

Redjalapeno said...

I'm thinking that way too, it's time to get the hell out of a place we should've never gone into in the first place.

markfromireland said...

Forgive the snark and the language doc I'm feeling very effed off I've been sodding well saying you should never have gone in from the moment it was mooted and then saying you should effing well get out from the moment the regime toppled.

I've got huge respect for your decency and I'd love to sit down with you some day and chew the fat and maybe a crab or two. ditto for Juan Cole's expertise but I'm fed up that you guys didn't see what all the rest of us saw. Or maybe not I don't know sometimes maybe it takes a peacekeeper from a small country - which is why I've been asked to and have agreed to rejoin my regiment for a short while mostly to assess what if anything we can do to help the wave of refugees to come from the next phase of operation enduringclusterfuckracistandillegalwars brought to you by a cynical alliance of fundamentalist southern death cults bloodthirsty cynical f***tards and so called economists who when they're not busy drowning government in a bath tub are busy seeing to it that the poor and vulnerable drown in their homes and who now that they're doing all right jack piss off and buy 3000 dollar shoes to smash as hard as they can onto the fingers of anyobody trying to climb the ladder out of the pit. They've never been shot at never been bombed, oh hang wolfowitz was bombed pity the resistance missed, and never had to quite literally shovel bits of kids into a bag and in our spare time helping rebuild stone walls around tiny fields all of which I've bloody well done during the last civil war promoted in the middle east by the coalition mentioned above.

Please get pissed off active and bring your country back to a great power for good in the world.

TTFN and keep well I hope to be back in a few weeks my son has promised to save anything from here he thinks I'll like. :-)

Redjalapeno said...

..but I'm fed up that you guys didn't see what all the rest of us saw

Mark, there are a lot of us that saw what was coming, which is why we were against the war before we went in. Part of not wanting Bush as President was not just an anti-conservative attitude, it was knowing that Bush was dangerously stupid.

There were/are plenty of powerless people against the war both prior to and after the invasion.

Part of my feeling, and maybe Docs, was that we felt that since we went in and f--ked the place up, it was our duty to stay and fix it. That has turned out to be a mistake. Why should we believe that the very people that screwed it up had any ability to fix it?

The repercussions of this ill conceived war will last decades, and that is not news to you. It is affecting your life in a very personal way, and for that I apologize.

I hope you stay safe and make it back here in better shape than when you left.

Dr. C said...

RJ, you said it better than I could. I'll remind you both, though, that we've been through this once before in Vietnam and, well do I remember, we fed American Soldiers and Vietnamese civilians into the caw for EIGHT YEARS before we finally got out and the inevitable happened. Why we didn't learn our lesson then, I don't know.
I am so frustrated at the inability of Democrats and Liberals in the US to effect change that some days I just sit in a corner and shake.

Mark, I echo RJ's wish that you stay safe. If I were younger I might immigrate again to Ireland. I still have my Alien Card from Dublin Castle!