War

On the possible verge of another war in Iraq, it made me think.

America hasn't WON a war since World War II. That war had a definitive end. There were treaty signings and parades and We Fucking Won! posters all over the place. But since then America hasn't won a war even though we have been in a state of combat almost the whole time since then.

Korea. That war has technically not ended. There is no truce or signing of a treaty. If there were a treaty then why do we still have troops at the DMZ? I had a friend in the Army who was stationed there. He told me that almost every week the North Koreans try to get some kind of incursion across the DMZ. Just no one hears about it. It's not news.

Vietnam. We lost thousands of troops and spent lots of money, but in the end we packed up and left. Let Vietnam "fall to the communists." But the funny thing is, there is capitalism in Vietnam and tourists go there often. If the war had stopped earlier, maybe that transition would have happened sooner.

Then there are little skirmishes all over the globe. Grenada. We were fighting for... Sheep? Somolia. We were fighting... I don't know who, but we left without any resolution. The Middle East. Beirut. We had a bunch of peace keeping marines blown up there in the 80's. Reagan said "Fuck this", and withdrew everyone.

Gulf War #1. Iraq did a dick move and invades Kuwait. We go over there and blow the shit out of everything. The news said we were not in Iraq. That's wrong. I had a friend on an LAV who said they were 60 miles from Baghdad and were ordered to turn around. All the oil fields that were on fire when the war was over? Yeah, US troops blew those up, not retreating Iraqis. Yup. We are the dick who crashes a party and clogs up the toilet, then sneaks out without trying to fix the plumbing.

The 80's and 90's were skirmishes usually in the Middle East. Libya, Lebanon, the PLO, nothing that could be defined as a war, but also without a real ending. We just kinda threw up our hands and said "Meh." And we left.

When 9/11 happened the neocons in the GW Bush White House, came in their collective pants. We could go blow the shit out of the Taliban in Afghanistan, but then attack Iraq. Just because.  So that is what we did. Blew up the Taliban. Then pointed to Saddam and said, "He's got WMDs! We must blow up more shit!" The war in Iraq leads us to where we are now. We took a stable dictatorship and destabilized it.

Was Saddam Hussein a bad guy? Oh, hell yes. But he was the only thing keeping the thousand years of Sunni and Shia hatred from doing what it's doing now. Saddam had his secular country under control by being a brutal dictator. When he was out of power we couldn't set up a western style democracy because that's not the way they think. It's tribal. They are more likely to tell you they are Sunni or Shiite than Iraqi.

So the drumbeat of war is on again from the GOP. "This whole mess is Obama's fault for not keeping troops in Iraq for the next 100 years." That is the GOP mind set. Thing is, it's not our country. We only went in and destablized it for a reason that has proven false. Before the British decided the borders of Iraq around the turn of the century, there were 3 separate lands. One for the Sunni, one for the Shiite, and one for the Kurds in the north.

We shouldn't be in this civil war because we are bad at winning wars.