I read this article in Rolling Stone called “Beyond Quagmire“. It is a compilation of opinions from a formidable panel of experts.(generals, anti-terrorism experts etc.) It is a great read and it is worth checking out. This article surmises that the best case scenario in the Iraq war is continued civil war and a strengthened Al-Qaida. The most likely scenario will be decades of ethnic cleansing and a war with Iran. The worst case could be world war III.

Anybody who has followed this war closely knows that it is a lost cause. Even the neocon objective of securing America’s interests in the middle east appears to have failed. The domino theory of a democratic Iraq spawning democracies in the middle east was divorced from reality when it was first floated and unimaginable today. The public already believes that the war is not winnable. Due to the diversion of resources the country is loosing the war in Afghanistan. If defeating terrorism was our only priority we must have successfully caught Osama bin Laden and obliterated the Taliban. The reality is the Al-Qaida is regrouping and thriving in Afghanistan and the Taliban is back making preparations for a spring offensive.

Over the weekend I saw the documentary “Why we Fight”. It illustrates that when war becomes profitable, there will be more it. The military industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned of is thriving today. The majority of the public is against the war in spite of the absence of the draft and sanitized versions by the administration. If the draft was alive this war would have ended long time ago. There are 300million plus people in America. There are 150,000-200,000 serving in Iraq and Afghanisthan. If we assume each of these service men have 10 close friends, and 10 close family members; it puts the number of people directly feeling the pinch of the horrors of war at 4 million. That made the Iraq War a reality show for an overwhelming majority of the people. Even this majority of unaffected people are beginning to see the reality and have stopped buying the conservative spin.

The Iraqi civil war does not seem to have any end in sight. We can restore temporary order but we can never eliminate the hatred they feel amongst one another. Civil war is the reality in Iraq. The soldiers are policing this civil war and more and more people even among military families are not in favor of this role. I am hopeful that people bring enough pressure on their elected representatives to bring this nightmare to an end. The reason more people are not being proactive is because they don’t feel the direct pinch and are more focussed in calling “American Idol” instead of calling their congressman or senator.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 13th, 2007 at 5:19 pm and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.