The Ravings of Demented Rabbits

Calm Like a Bomb

(Written on 8/6, for the curious, but I just got around to posting)

Ignite, ignite.

Not to go off on a totally Livejournalish rant, but life around here sucks at the moment. Dad around the house all day pretty much threw everything off, to the point where none of us is getting enough sleep, tempers are flaring, and it's all made worse by my supposed job hunt, which involves on the one hand fending off 24/7 requests on my time by parents who then get angry when I haven't the time to jump in the car and drive to town, which is apparently the only true way to get a job. So not so good. And my attitude towards the thing is not the best, either. So just not good. Hopefully we'll be fixing that next week or so.

On a bookish note, the Bourne Identity is pretty good. In ways, it's even better than the movie, and pretty much totally different as well. Worth reading. The Bourne Supremacy, which I have yet to see so can't compare to the book, is also worth reading, with the caveat that it's very much one of those late '80s fascination-with-the-newly-discovered-Orient books (you've read them before, no doubt), and sort of suffers for it. But good. I also found my airplane reading from Michigan, by the name of Road to Baghdad - Behind Enemy Lines, a highly interesting read as well. It's the autobiography of an American officer who got stuck in Kuwait as Saddam overran the place, and a rather peculiar look at the leadup to the first Gulf War.

Which sort of belatedly leads us to a topic which I meant to cover days ago during all those politics posts, but just haven't had the energy to yet. And that's Iraq. I'm a little hesitant to go to this much effort to talk about it, because I think you've either made up your mind about the thing, or you haven't. Nevertheless, I entertain myself with things like this, so deal.

This thread fairly well sums up my views about a war with Iraq before and during the actual invasion part of things. Too, a read through this timeline and the ones after it make for some interesting reading.

So basically, my thinking on the war went about like this:

- Saddam is not exactly a champion of goodness, light, and the warm fuzzy feeling. Even if he wasn't responsible for all the things we said he was responsible for, what he IS responsible for is bad enough.

- Too, Saddam is either trying to acquire WMD or is trying to develop them or has some left over from when he actually did have some. And at the time, pretty much everybody else in the world agreed by default. I mean, throughout the 90s it seemed to be standard operating procedure for everyone to just figure that Saddam was a sneaky bastard who was hiding the things from us. Why else is he giving the inspectors such a hard time?

- WMD aside, there are a number of UN resolution violations to deal with, some or all of which void the Gulf War truce we made with Iraq.

- We've been fighting a sort of low-level air war with Iraq for about a decade. It doesn't seem to be doing a whole lot. And it doesn't appear as if it's going to inside of the lifetime of either Saddam or his kids.

- It would be sort of nice if we could effect an actual democratic government in that part of the world at some point.

So on the strength of all that, I ended up being in favor of the whole thing on the strength of what I could figure out about it, at the same time being fairly distrustful of what the administration had to say about it all. Notably:

- Iraq may or may not have been tied in with Osama Bin Laden, but I tend to doubt that Al Queda had any sort of real presence in Iraq prior to the invasion and resultant chaos.

- Despite my feeling that Iraq had or wanted WMD, much of the case the Bush administration was making was pretty iffy, where not outright scandalous (see also: Plame, Valarie and Intelligence, British). This ought to have been slightly more disturbing than I found it at the time.

- Too, whatever France and the UN thought they were doing, Bush's little leap in the face of world opinion was slightly iffy. I still can't help but think that if somebody like Clinton had been doing all the war buildup, the world would have jumped in line, whereas Bush pisses people off just by being himself.

There were also a couple of other questions to be asked about Iraq, such as "Why Iraq, when we have perfectly legitimate terrorist states like North Korea, who everyone basically agrees do not champion the causes of small forest animals?" To that, I figure, well, there's a fairly large chance that going after North Korea will result in chunks of, say, South Korea going missing, not to mention, well, we're already fighting Iraq, so why not?

So at the end of the day I came down in favor of the war, while being rather distrustful of the administration about the matter. Not the way I'd like to be about it, but whatever.

At any rate, here we are more than a year later. The invasion part of the war is over, and the occupation has been going for a year or so. And my thoughts on that?

- It would appear that we were either very much mistaken about the WMD thing, or the Iraqis were exceedingly clever in hiding the things. Yes, this was a big part of why we went to war. No, it does not to my mind invalidate the whole war.

- I haven't entirely made up my mind on a lot of things about the occupation, a lot of which has to do with my feeling that I'm not getting a very clear picture of what's going on. I blame the media, which seems to have become very very polarized on the subject, to the point that any pretense of objectivity has been thrown out.

- That having been said, there's been a lot said about there not being a plan, and the latter bit of that timeline I linked to previously should illustrate that pretty well. What's the plan for an Iraqi government? We dunno. Where are the WMDs? We dunno. Why the hell didn't you forsee the looting? We dunno. In and of itself, this is deeply troublesome.

- And I dislike the business of trying to compare this whole thing to Vietnam, which was a different war at a different time in a different place about different things. Nevertheless, whatever we're doing with the Iraqi government reminds me very strongly of our escapades in Vietnam, not to mention Latin America. Chalabi and company seemed Diem-like in their unpopularity and their lack of a clue. And Allawi, so far as I can tell, is a rather unpleasant individual, not to mention a former Baathist. This leads one to wonder if we're promoting democracy over there, or a thinly-disguised dictatorship in a way that for some reason reminds me of the 1980s.

Dunno. But I get the feeling that my pet rabbit could run this whole fiasco better than the Bush administration.

And on another note, what's going on in Afghanistan these days? Anybody?

Posted by Dwip at August 9, 2004 12:14 PM