Civil War in Iraq

We're there. It's not something that Iraq is descending into. We're there. And the next question is: Now what?

The only solution I have to the mess is one that's not too optimistic: Put a wall around the place, throw raw meat over the wall from time to time, let them fight it out until they're tired of fighting, then make friends with whoever wins.

Unfortunately, that's a long-term problem. It took Lebanon 14 years of civil war before the various sects there were tired of fighting each other and made peace. Of course, the Palestinians and Israelis and Syrians mucking around in Lebanon didn't help, much as the Iranians and Saudis mucking around in Iraq don't help...

Ronald Reagan was, by and large, a mediocre President, whose sole accomplishment on most days was avoiding nodding off during a cabinet meeting (but sometimes he didn't manage that much). But from time to time he did wake up and do something right, and one of those things was to get our troops the hell out of the Lebanese civil war and let the Lebanese do what the Lebanese had to do to get all that shit out of their system without our troops being targets in the middle of all that shit. The irony is that after the vast majority of the Lebanese got tired of war and spent 15 years in peaceful (if sometimes uneasy) coexistence, a tiny minority in the south did one stupid thing, and Israel brought war to them all over again...

Let'em fight it out. It's the only thing we can do. There will be a lot of dead bodies, but at least they won't be American bodies, and there won't be $100 billion a year worth of American gold down the drain trying to suppress a civil war that isn't going to end until they all fight it out and get it out of their systems. Mucking around in other peoples' civil wars never works out well. It didn't work out well when we supported the White Russians against the Reds in Russia in 1918, it didn't work out well when we supported the Catholics in South Vietnam against just about everybody else in Vietnam, it didn't work out well when we intervened in Lebanon's civil war, and it isn't going to work out any better in Iraq.

Meanwhile, the bodies will pile up, far more bodies than Saddam Hussein piled up during his long time of keeping the populance from killing each other, but what the hey, we overthrew Saddam and that's good, right? Too bad we didn't have the foggiest notion what to do after we overthrew Saddam, but hey, remember, results don't count in Bushevik America, only intentions, and our intentions were good, right?

-Badtux the Unoptimistic Penguin