JMO - Dancing on the edge of a sword

This post is more a vent about the US presence in the Middle East, namely Iraq. It's not about the civil war we started with our invasion and occupation. I vent, rant and praise on that and other topics of the day I hear on the radio news and information shows and read in the newspaper (several 3-5 days per week) on my MySpace Web page. I post about 2-3 times per week, and I hope people enjoy the ramblings.

Anyway, this post is about our presence there. I really wonder if the people who decided we should invade and occupy Iraq, going back to the early 1990's conservative (aka, republican) group formed after the first Iraq war, really bothered to read let alone understand the history of the Middle East. If they didn't, they were simply stupid, and if they did, then they're both dumb and stupid. And worse, totally reckless with this nation's resources and reputation.

Any decent college student or an adult with any modicum of knowledge of history should have thought through the events they were proposing, especially not listening to the zealot Iraqis who hadn't been back in decades escaping Saddham Hussein's terror but to the real experts who have lived there over the years to understand Iraq isn't a real nation, but a country sewn together post-WW II by the British for monopolizing the region oil resources.

We should have read the country is a composite of three nationalities with ties to other nations in the Middle East, some our ally and some less so. We would have seen that the post-invasion plan is far more important than the war plan. But more importantly, we simply should haven't gone in there as we did when we did. We simply could have waited Saddham out from the forces within Iraq and enlisted the other countries to establish a peaceful transistion.

But as it is now, we're dancing on the edge of a sword, and we're not holding the sword. The Iraqis are holding it, balancing their own internal civil strive and war, and we're simply trying to find the least painful way out while keeping a tie to the oil resources, the real reason we invaded. Simply put, corporate greed. The President can jabber all he wants about terrorism, it didn't exist there when he agreed to the plan to invade.

I won't say the President was suckered by Cheney, Wolfowitz, etal, because he wanted to be a war President and go down in history in the name of his god (I'll use lower case here because no real god would sanction this war). It was all political for a number of reasons, but mostly to have control of Iraq's vast oil resources, enough for decades to come. "If only...", they told the President, and he was hooked and became its disciple.

And now we dancing as best we can while the all the politicians put the best spin on it, except it's costing lives. American soldiers, contractors, and civilians. But mostly Iragi lives, 10 times more dead, hundred times injured, and thousands times displaced or emigrated. We have destroyed a country, initiated a civil war, and we have no peace plan. We're cutting our feet every day with our dance, and we can't seem to see we're dying ourselves.

I don't have answers to Iraq. I listen and read from the diverse sources of experts with experience in and with the Middle East, and I simply can't find an answer that wins for everyone. And that's the saddness, we're now down to the lessor of evils for choices, which will take decades if not generations to resolve. We forget these people were there when the country was created and have lived through their own history. Something we failed to grasp.

And we haven't asked the question, "Would we be any different?", if we where them? We failed to walk in their shoes, shared their experience and witnessed their history. If we had, we wouldn't be there today.