"Stuff happens."

Yup. I'm so happy I could just hurl...>

Time to modulate our gaze a tad the better to ensure that one Nixon retread (Rumsfeld) does not hog the pre-Hillary-pillory-stocks from another (Cheney); the conclusion to Joan Didion's 8000+word forensic on the RN-schooled VP who, one-score-and-twelve years on, almost induces sincere nostalgia for The Real Thing, five-o-clock shadow and all:

From "Cheney: The Fatal Touch" at

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19376

"In 1991, explaining why he agreed with George H.W. Bush's decision not to take the Gulf War to Baghdad, Cheney had acknowledged the probability that any such invasion would be followed by civil war in Iraq":

'Once you've got Baghdad, it's not clear what you do with it. It's not clear what kind of government you would put in.... Is it going to be a Shia regime, a Sunni regime or a Kurdish regime? Or one that tilts toward the Baathists, or one that tilts toward the Islamic fundamentalists?... How long does the United States military have to stay to protect the people that sign on for that government, and what happens to it once we leave?'

"By January 2006, when the prescience of these questions was evident and polling showed that 47 percent of Iraqis approved of 'attacks on US-led forces,' and the administration was still calculating that it could silence domestic doubt by accusing the doubter of wanting to 'cut and run,' the Vice President assured Fox News that the course had been true. 'When we look back on this ten years hence,' he said, a time frame suggesting that he was once again leaving the cleanup to someone else, 'we will have fundamentally changed the course of history in that part of the world, and that will be an enormous advantage for the United States and for all of those countries that live in the region.'">

Before falling into a Blame Rumsfeld frenzy, you might want to read some more about the looting story.

Check out this article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,974193,00.html

It's from The Guardian - hardly a proBush newspaper - about the misreporting.>

Since when do you trust the CIA leaking a report to the media?>

My gut-level feeling is that we're simply losing it over there in Iraq. But we may still run in the long run. Think Vietnam. We lost the battle and won the war. We is not US, we is globalization and connectivity. Vietnam is integrating into the world economy and seeking direct foreign investment. They have opened their economy and are joining the core.

All that bloodshed and destruction, then a thirty year interlude, and globalization is victorious. I'm suspicious though, that we could have had victory without the bloodshed and destruction.

Is impatience our downfall? Or idealism? Does it sound revolutionary to impose our political visions on other people? To choose for them the bloodshed and destruction route for their own good?

I wonder if things would have worked themselves out if we had let well enough alone. I'm not necessarily saying isolationism, because culture and commerce are very potent exports, and like in the case of Vietnam they can bring these gap countries slowly into the core.>

The museum looting stories later turned out to be way overblown (according to later news stories and documentaries). A lot of the more valuable items had already been removed and hidden by museum employees in anticipation of just such an event, and an amnesty offered by the museum and the CPA spurred the return of many of the items that had been stolen. A U.S. military officer made it his personal crusade to get items returned (he even wrote a book about it).>

Em:

We're in a long war, and Iraq and Afghanistan are but battles in this war...Too many of us either haven't grasped this -- or we don't want to admit it.

I guess that's me - although I fall into the "haven't grasped this" column.

Could you explain to me:

1) Who is our enemy?
2) How will we know if we have won or lost?
3) If Iraq/Afganistan are just "battles", how many invasions and nation rebuildings are we going to do? Because I think if we try too many more we will run out of money and soldiers.>

Wow, Anonymous(maybe Em). You've really bought the whole shibang. I'm curious as to what you think of the article by Leonard Pitts that I posted.

You are right that we are fighting a global problem. Could you explain how invading countries who weren't cooperating with terrorism helped? Could you explain how remaining in Iraq helps? Could you explain how it helps to display our great military might to the whole Arab world when it's been shown that it increases jihadism.>

Maybe we should have invaded Saudi Arabia; they also support terrorists in Israel, and some of the 9/11 hijackers actually came from there.
Maybe we should have gone into the West Bank and Gaza instead.

While I think that support is totally wrong, that's not why we went into Iraq.

As for the looting, whether or not the museum was lotted as badly as the Evil Media claimed, the problem was the looting of the whole country, and the understanding that we would not stop it. We took away their government and gave them nothing in exchange. As it says in a Jewish text called Pirkei Avot, "Pray for the government, for without it, men would devour each other".>

At least they've cut the murder-bombings way down. If they had done it right they might have finished Hezbollah (which is not as robust as that liar Nesrallah would have us think.
Democracy may not work too well, either, since Hamas and Hezbollah got into the governments that way...>