US Not Serious about Iraq

The Washington Post article about the unwillingness of the government to staff the embassy in Baghdad adequately is to me the nail in the coffin for the future of Iraq. The US just does not care enough to try hard to win the war in Iraq. They send Crocker to be Ambassador and then they don't support him. Instead, when he gives his best judgment of what the embassy needs, he gets characterized as a panicky crybaby. What he is asking for is does not sound ideal for the State Department; it sounds like every Arabist and Arab speaker would be in Iraq, putting a hardship on other posts in the Middle East, but hey, is this a war we want to win or not? Not, apparently.

It convinces me that America got the government it deserved, a bunch of cowardly, inept, greedy SOBs. The best and the brightest declined to serve in Vietnam, as George Bush, Bill Clinton, and Dick Cheney did. Al Gore went to Vietnam, and had the election stolen from him as a reward. Now the best and the brightest refuse to go to Iraq. Hey, they can stay here and make billions in the hedge fund or private equity business. Look at Mitt Romney; he didn't serve in the military (apparently his Mormon missionary service exempted him), and when he made his millions in private equity, he avoided a large share of his taxes by taking much of his income as capital gains rather than salary, unlike the families of the ordinary people who died in his place in Vietnam, and now in Iraq.

This is a government that knows how to make OTHER people sacrifice, and like it. However, whatever they have been doing is now working in Iraq. It's a huge mess, but they will just walk away from it. The Republicans who are so concerned about saving babies from abortion are responsible for the deaths of many more thousands of babies in Iraq. They don't care, as long as they get their money.