Sunday, June 15, 2014

Beaver weekend

This beaver hasn't died yet but he sure is busy.

Life seems to be getting in the way of fun things like posting snarky articles and comments around the innerwebs. Now where was I....


Don't you just love it when the government causes a problem then tries to blame somebody else? Such is the case with Iraq. Roll back through history a bit and we find that the U.S. helped Saddam gain power. We even supplied him with weapons to fight Iran in the 80s. Ah yes Iran another of our success stories where we forced out a democratically elected leader and installed the Shah a brutal dictator no better than Saddam. Two of the biggest mistakes in Iraq was outlawing the Bath party which had made up the only form of government in the country for decades. The other being the abolishing of Saddams'  army thereby creating a massive power vacuum. And if you know anything about Iraqi history you'd know that there's been a blood feud there for centuries (dating back to the 13th century). Putting the majority in power did nothing to stop the situation as Iraq under Saddam was more or less secular and based on a socialist system.

Given the fact that we basically trashed their country in terms of government, economy and stripped it's leadership of power we now see the end result, civil war. We must not have done a very good job of training their military as they cut and ran in the latest altercation. Something is terribly wrong when a force of 30,000 is intimidated by just 800. But there's a bit more to that than is reported. There is the sense of country not factored in all this. It's been noted that during the American civil war troops would not fire on fellow countrymen during the heat of battle after all these were just plain folks just like the rest of us. Most were farmers in the south and not able to buy they way out of the conflict. In Iraq the bulk of the wealthy and middle class left the country at the beginning of the conflict which left the poor to do the dirty work as usual. 

But the real issue here is what's happening to the countries oil wealth. In spite of and conflict the oil will still flow and petro-dollars banked. And what better opportunity to make off with a bunch of loot while the underlings are busy fighting each other.  

Hum...No bank fails this week

4 comments:

opit said...

"what better opportunity to make off with a bunch of loot while the underlings are busy fighting each other. "
And you call it a failure.
Kurdish independence is functional - despite the threat to Turkish stability from the PKK that entails....and which Saddam had curtailed. Aina reported ongoing genocide of pacifist Iraqi Christians by Kurds after the central government had fallen.
Keeping the only people from power who had experience in its use kept the bureaucracy in disarray. Teachers, engineers and doctors were killed or run off. Power supply was unreliable - affecting schools, hospitals, water treatment...and poor Fallujah was kept sick not just by DU but by a clusterfuck project of water treatment.
Post Saddam Iraq : Desert Crossing was a 1999 war game Rumsfeld stashed in an NSA file - but the 'Bible for Iraq' was never really covered - no more than Bremer's 100 Orders which wrecked Iraq business by making it subject to foreigners. Iraq seedstocks were destroyed - the initial casualty ( Afghanistan came later ) of Rumsfeld's interests in Monsanto and terminator seeds. Presumably GM 'green revolution' got its day as well. It attacks the gut flora and DNA through use of pesticide bred into the plants via gene splicing using animal DNA - a technique which proliferates oncontrollably in the wild. ( See China's rejection of US corn shipments )

billy pilgrim said...

your foreign policy is like a great big game of whack a mole.

BBC said...

Boy, you would really be busy if you went back to work.

Roger Owen Green said...

Beaver Attacks New York Man, Pulls Him From Kayak