The right to buy a weapon is the right to be free. -- A. E. Van Vogt
Welcome to the New Year, and this is the open thread for your New Year’s Resolutions. Tell me how you swore to improve youself, either mentally, physically, or relationship-ally.
(I don’t have any, since I, of course, am perfect in every way, and am in need of no further improvements.)
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have my Megalomaniacs Anonymous meeting in just a few minutes…
We are sending troops into a foreign Muslim nation that has suffered a massive loss of life and lots of mercenaries “civilian operatives” that are there just to collect a paycheck by shuttling supplies around at the direction of an American-led “coalition of the willing”.
Maybe the reason that the Left are bemoaning what the “Arab Street” will say is because they might end up having to thank the United States and her allies for coming to the rescue to do for those people what they could not do for themselves. Possible?
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Quick question: am I referring to Southwest Asia or Southeast Asia? If you can’t tell, and the only difference is whether it was a natural disaster or an U.N.-natural one, then doesn’t logic suggest that we should be just as concerned in returning things to normal just as quickly as possible?
In Iraq, this means elections. Elections means the utter obliteration of the attempted use of the “Iraqi insurgency” meme that was making the rounds a few weeks ago, because once there is an Iraqi government in charge, there is no way that the terrorists can claim to be “insurgents” attempting to get rid of an occupying force. Once that government is in place, then we will be nothing more influential than forward-deployed troops, similar to what we did in Germany and Japan. It allows for an intermingling of culture, supplemental troops for training and enhancing the Iraqi troops that will be fighting the foreign invaders (coming from Iran and Syria), and a stabilizing influence, in that there will be a strong reason to keep the government a secular one, rather than the Ba’athist we got rid of or the theocratic one that Iran is hoping for.
The form of government (Republic seems likely, but they come from a culture where Constitutional Monarchies are not uncommon) is up for debate, but we will not let a theocratic one come into being. There will be a strong push away from such an entity using every means of influence available to the US. There is a reason why our Founders put that kind of limitation in our Constitution, and there will be much debate about the necessity of keeping religions influence on government to an absolute minimum.
But as for the rest of it, there are women’s rights, ways to integrate modern culture into what laws they have, and we have taken on a problem that will last for a generation or more. My wife asked me once when I thought we would be pulling our troops out of Iraq, and I said, “I’m guessing a generation or two after we pull them out of Europe, Japan, and South Korea.”
What do you think?
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