Iraq War Is a Mess

Most of the op-eds in the NY Times today deal with the mess we are in in Iraq. For me the best is David Kennedy's "The Best Army We Can Buy", although it goes hand-in-hand with Duncan's "Uniform Sacrifice." The theme is that Iraq is not a war that the US is fighting as a nation, but one which we have hired mercenaries to fight. Although many are American mercenaries, many more are more typical mercenaries, Hispanic immigrants who are not citizens.

I have a very low opinion of Bush, Cheney, and Republicans in general as military leaders. Bush joined the National Guard to stay out of Vietnam, and even worse, after the Air Force had trained him as a jet fighter pilot at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not a million or more, Bush said, "Hey, I'm going to Harvard Business School. I'm done with the National Guard. The US can take its hundreds of thousands of dollars that it spent on me and shove it!" That is in general Bush's attitude toward the government's money (spend it on yourself or your friends, it's free), and his attitude toward defending America. He and Cheney are cowards. After 9/11, Bush flew to Louisiana and Nebraska rather than return to Washington to lead the country, and Cheney went into some cave under or near the White House. These are not men that I would want to follow into battle.

In general the people who favored Iraq, Republicans and Jews, won't fight for it. How many children of wealthy Republicans are in the military in Iraq? And how many Jews? The neo-cons who lobbied so strongly for the Iraq war were predominantly Jews. One was my old nemesis, Richard Perle.

That there is something wrong with Jewish attitudes is illustrated by the dispute between Israeli Prime Minister Sharon and London Mayor Livingstone. As this article in Haaretz shows, Jews are the verbal attack dogs of the world, currently led by a hate-filled Sharon. As Livingstone implied, Israeli Jews are at least partly to blame for inflaming the hatred of Muslims which has resulted in the current rash of terrorism around the world. Of course, there is a lot of bad blood between Britain and Israel, because before World War II, Palestine was a British protectorate, and Jews living there introduced terrorism into the Middle East in order to kill British officials, most notably when they blew up the King David Hotel. In addition, the American invasion of Iraq, instigated under pressure from the Jewish neo-cons, has something to do with the Muslim terrorism problem, too.

On the Bush is a coward issue, I just want to say that I went to Vietnam. I think it is sad how few others did. But, in the Senate, for example, you can see how much better men the veterans are -- McCain, Hegel, Roberts, etc. -- than the draft dodgers. I don't really count John Kerry as a veteran, since he turned on his Vietnam veteran colleagues when he returned to the US.