So, I did what was probably a very stupid thing today (like this is something new in my life)...

I was reading one of these Iraqi blogs, I’m not quite sure if it was Raed of Dear Raed fame or not but the blog is Raed in the Middle.

Anyway, the guy was talking about the whole transfer of power and everything else... this one is a CIA puppet, Bush is this, and so on and so on, you get the drift.

Now, any reasonable person has to figure living in Iraq right now has got to have a big suck factor involved (to put it mildly) but, can someone tell me please what the hell the answer is supposed to be!?!

There was a poll on the local news channel (the real local one on cable with the normal looking - ugly anchor people) where they asked when American troops should be withdrawn from Iraq and a majority (something like 48%) said immediately.

In the meantime, this guy on the blog was ranting and raving about the situation.

They’re lopping people’s heads off and televising it and you get this sense that people in our country are just besides themselves over this - the horror of it (and it‘s not like I’m denying it is an ugly, ugly thing).

In the meantime though (and as I said before), we’ve spent the better part of the last ten years flying over this damn country, dropping bombs, launching cruise missiles and enforcing these sanctions and until they invaded about a year ago the only thing it was doing was making life miserable for the people living in Iraq.

So, now there are troops on the ground, they’ve been there a year and there’s these bombings going on and kidnapping and all kinds of crappy things and people kind of seem to have the attitude that this is all to much and we should just walk away.

And it made me think of New York city in the late seventies and throughout the eighties when there was a lot more crime and graffiti everywhere and people said you just couldn’t do anything about it and so a lot of businesses and people moved away from the city.

Someone came along and decided it wasn’t the way things should be and it took a couple of years but the city is a lot better now than it was.

I also was thinking about how back in the 30’s there were groups of nations that really didn’t think it was worth fighting over anything (because WW1 had been so horrible) and so their foreign policy was one of appeasement which meant that axis countries were allowed to roll in and take over other nations (Poland, the Sudetenland, Ethiopia, Manchuria).

The thing I’m trying to get at is appeasement never ever seems to work that well.

But, maybe I’m wrong so, crack the history books and see if you can prove me wrong.

Or maybe you’ll find that there are some battles you can’t walk away from and it might just be that we’re in the middle of one.

Anyway, I wrote the guy (which means I will probably wind up on some Patriot Act FBI list somewhere) and I just asked him if he thought us not being there (like starting tomorrow) would make things that much better or if things had been so much better when Saddam was running the show. I know it sounds simplistic and a bit naive but I really do hope 10 years from now things are better in that country - one thing is what we were doing from 91 through 2003 sure didn’t do much good.