Whither Iraq? (And other thoughts on a depressing rainy Friday)

[Jackpine Radical]

So you think this mess is going to end soon? You think electing a Democrat will bring the troops home?

Back up to 1991. Why did Bush I pull up short of Baghdad? Not because he wanted to avoid a prolonged war. Rather, they (the US and the Saudis) put the Iraq situation on ice because Saddam was still very useful.

Specifically, Saddam was useful as a means of keeping Iraq from coming unglued into its constitent ethnic groups. Like Tito in Jugoslawia, Saddam kept a multi-ethnic cauldron below the boiling point via brutal means. He was a despot, but a useful one. The game was to keep him in place and control him like a bishop trapped behind your pawns. That was the formula for the middle-game in the Middle East. The Neocons (read: Cheney) thought it was time to move on to the end game, so they took out Saddam, with predictable (and predicted) results. The current chaos is very much to their liking. We just go on building our giant embassy and seeing to it that Hillary gets elected to oversee the next phase of the game, which will not involve anything remotely resembling an end to the bloodshed.

You watch. Hillary will be elected with the tacit backing of Murdoch abd the rest of the M$M, and the war will go on. We will get a nightmarish tangle of a national healthcare plan that gives the insurance companies and HMOs a license to steal. There will be some movement on environmental issues, but it will be more show than substance. But abortions will remain legal and there may be some mild gains for the GLBT crowd. I guess that's something, at least.

[Hydra]

1. America loves despots

as long as they do what we tell them to.