re: #162 Hecuba’s daughter

Some of this seems like deja vu. Our military forces had the quick victory in Iraq but it was the non-experts that the Bush team sent in to govern Iraq that turned the victory into a quagmire.

Not quite correct. It was the neocons that demanded the invasion in the first place. Iraq was always a bar with three biker gangs in it : Sunnis, Shia, and Kurds. The bartender was a Sunni with five bar backs, all with shotguns. Everyone else had long sharp knives. Once in a while, he would have a bar back randomly shoot a Kurd or a Shia.

The United States sent one soldier into the bar with a machine gun and killed the bar backs and the bartender and said “Drinks are on me!” For about twenty minutes, everybody partied on. Then, when the soldier’s back was turned, a Shia shivved a Kurd.

When he turned around to deal with that, two Kurds shivved two Sunnis. When he heard that commotion, he turned around again and three Shias shivved a Sunni and two Kurds. He got on the radio and called for backup. HQ said, “Dude you’ve got this covered, you don’t need any more help. Everyone here loves us!”

The soldier’s Intelligence Staff had been yelling at the Neo-cons that this was a bar fight waiting to happen. The Neo-cons responded by firing the Generals begging them to listen because the Intelligence Staff knew what they were doing.

And that’s how we got to where we are today. Stupid is as stupid does. Tribes, amazingly enough, act like tribes in violent conflict.

Read the news from South Sudan lately? “Oh, they’re all Christians! They’re free from those ravenous Muslims in the Sudan! They’ll get along just fine once they are independent!”

Nope, nope, nope.