Bring Em On

Once again, I tip my hat to Today in Iraq. Today's news includes reports of at least 30, maybe 41 injured in a suicide bombing (fortunately, the reports I read indicate no deaths in this bombing, although the overnight was deadly for at least three soldiers).

Al Giordano adds some perspective to the Iraq situation by linking to an article at Submerging Markets. Al adds his two cents, already confirming that he has far more weight in the web log world than myself--I think I'm around .000002 cents worth--and I hope he forgives me for adding his entire post regarding James Henry's essay:

"There is far more evidence that James Baker and George Bush, Sr., backed what George, Jr. calls a terror regime in Iraq - during a time when it was openly pursuing Weapons of Mass Destruction - than there is evidence that Iraq had anything to do with the September 11, 2001, attacks or was developing WMDs in recent years.

Thus, if the same logic with which Iraq was invaded and Saddam Hussein's sons were made military targets were to be applied where there is, in fact, hard evidence of support for terror regimes, the U.S. military would have to invade the Bush family estate in Kennebunkport... Bush, Jr. would have to offer a large cash reward for the arrest of his own father... (and, if consistent policy were applied to the sons of terror supporters, he and his election-robbing brother Jeb would become U.S. military targets).

If that sounds absurd, well, apply the same standards to what Dubya has done in Iraq.

There is one consistency though in the results of Father and Son's policies: failure to catch the alleged perp.
Saddam and Bush, Sr. are both still at large."

Bull's eye. Don't forget to check out the James Henry article (link above). Shorter version, also courtesy of Giordano, who cites this quote:

"...if Iraq's foreign debt had been restructured in the late 1980s, when Baker was Secretary of State, many of our difficulties with Iraq -- including Saddam's 1990 invasion of Kuwait, the prolonged embargo, and our most recent invasion of Iraq -- might well have been avoided entirely."

Instead, what we've got is chaos. Once again, Nightline carried a report about the war--it appears that the insurgents will be able to harass the occupying troops more or less indefinitely. The "solution" for our soldiers will be substituting in Iraqi "militia." Folks, what you've got is the engineering of the Iraq Civil War, which will be anything BUT civil. Sadly, that might be the ONLY thing that will keep more of our soldiers from getting killed, but, in the final analysis, the ONLY people who haven't yet admitted to the disaster that's become of our Middle East policy are those who implemented it, and their political supporters.

We'll be paying the price for this foreign policy fuck-up for a long time.