Ken Nelson

Ah… the good old days. 

I don’t understand all this “combat troops” out of Iraq talk.  It still is dangerous there. 50,000 troops remain, all with significant combat capability and with real world patrolling and defense missions. Sounds like “combat” to me.

Reports like this remind me that our newspapers and media outlets just have no idea what they write about. In this case, they just go along with what the Obama administration wants to tout.   The touting, btw, is in support of 100 billion in budget cuts, not “we won”.  It’s “yippee, it’s okay to cut”.  It is okay to be a tool, but at least know it. I doubt the media really get it.

I supported the initial invasion of Iraq. Maybe this was just me being patriotic, but also a lot of it was that I thought we would be smart in victory, not dumb. So after the first three weeks, I supported very little of what went on.  We did not need to drive around getting ourselves blown up. We did not need to defend Sunni against Shiite against Kurd against Wahhabi. Far better would have been to just seal off any WMD sites, and then go to the Iran border and let Iraq sort itself out.

Our military has done an amazing, but unnecessary, and unsustainable, job in Iraq but ultimately the Iraqi culture is not up to the task of being our democratic ally in the region.  Maybe I’ll be proven wrong, hope so, but… I’m usually right and expect to be here.

So at a cost of trillions, 4,000 US deaths, and thousands more casualties we now have a new, sort of democratic nation where only a few hundred are blown up each month in car bombings.  We now have a near nuclear Iran, and we now have a true ally (Israel) mortally threatened. And instead of a forward base against Iran we have a nation we are plotting to retreat from as soon as possible.

All in all… I’d have to say, if this is victory, losing must REALLY suck. Clearly, it wasn’t worth it, and all in all, I’d have to say it is just more evidence that we aren’t the country we once were.  Is it unpatriotic to say this?  Maybe. I’d certainly hate to have a son killed there and read stuff like this.  But… I’ve got a son getting older every day, and I’d like to avoid him being wasted on ventures like this.

Put another way… if I knew then, what I know now, I’d have never supported doing anything other than trying to assassinate Saddam Hussein, or possibly invading and making a sharp right turn.

And… it will take Pearl Harbor II to convince me that anything other than targeted assassination and massive bombing should be our next response against countries that act against our interests.