Juan Cole is one of the most well-known, renowned bloggers out there, and for good reason. He is a college professor and an expert on the Middle East. I've learned so much from him over the years, and this blog entry of his is no exception. In this, he speaks of how Iraq has affected and could still affect us here at home. Bush has spent $2 trillion and counting on this war, and he's putting it all on the card. Our deficit's the highest it's ever been, and what if the countries lending us money decide they don't want us there anymore? Also, Bush's feeble "stimulus" package is a joke and world markets have responded to it as a joke. What if he had $2 trillion to use as a stimulus package? But no, he blew it all on Iraq. Who knows if we'd even need a stimulus if we weren't in Iraq? Notice that's when our gas prices started shooting through the roof? As Cole says, we could have people here losing everything due to the mortgage crisis and hyperinflation, and the government won't help them (and if they, by some miracle, do help them, the people who just lost their homes have to prove to the government that they're eligible for help) because "winning" Iraq is so much more important than a few working-class, homeless Americans.
The "surge" is also a big joke. The media raves about it, and all the candidates look on Iraq as a success now. But the surge required a huge increase in our military forces. Let's say there was a huge riot in Los Angeles, and crime rates just shot way up. The National Guard was sent into LA to quash the riot and stick around to maintain some form of stability. Would crime go down? Sure. But keeping it down would require an indefinite presence, which of course is unrealistic at best. That's what this surge is. Its success is dependent on keeping more and more of our troops there indefinitely. McCain said we could be there for a century. More people would know of this simple kind of logic if the media did their jobs. That's another tragedy. We're falling off the cliff, and we're totally unaware of it because we're ignorant and our heads are filled with trivial, meaningless information.
1 comment:
Ah, the surge---what an unheralded success! Let me shake your hand, King George! That's what the mainstream press and Republicans sound like---sycophants all!
Why are people so content to only look at the surface of things, as if they're afraid of what truth lurks beneath? The surge in troop numbers is only part of the reason why violence has "decreased". One of the main reasons is that we're paying our former enemies, the "insurgents", $10 a day to patrol their neighborhoods for us. Someday we'll have to stop paying. The results of that action will be predictably tragic. 2 trillion dollars?!? That's basically a ton of scratch-off lotto tickets: you have no idea what prize you may win, and then the big letdown when you reveal the truth.
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