I don’t think I really need to comment on this or this.

So some fool talking head on NBC last night is like “If the war goes on for more than six weeks, it will be a serious political problem for Bush.”

It’s about here where you sort of need to pause for a moment, and realize that we’re living in the century of the five YEAR war. In fact, within the lifespan of the United States, we’ve had all of, say, one war that was less than a year, and that was Gulf War I. And why is that? Because we stopped short of fully invading Iraq. Limited objectives, limited time. This time is different – full blown country takeovers against opposition take a while. Anybody with any amount of intelligence on the matter has known this for some time.

So if you haven’t noticed, my respect for the media is declining. I have some respect for the embedded guys, but 90% of your talking heads are fools.

This is the post that never ends, it goes on and on my friends…

So, anyway, the point of the whole thing here is less of a rant against a specific position, though most if not all of the previous was beating on the anti-war crowd. I beat on the kill em all crowd, too, not that you hear much of it. One likes to bill oneself as a political moderate, who doesn’t particularly like the way far left or the way far right much. But the point here is a rant about common sense. Or uncommon sense, since a lot of people seem to have pretty much skipped American History in school, or got screwed in the learning of it. I’m coming to the conclusion over time that the way American History ought to be taught in High School is with less of an emphasis on the earlier stuff, and more of an emphasis on post-1945, which is precisely the bit that seems to get cut out of most classes that I’ve seen or been in. I say this as a historian, of course, and I’m not entirely sure how to condense the massive amount of reading that needs to be done to understand, say, the Vietnam War, but I am of the belief that Americans should have an understanding of our foreign policy over the last 50 years and why we did what we did. There seems to be a lack of understanding of it, even by many of those who lived through it. The idea that I, a 22 year old history student, should have, even with my limited reading, a better understanding of these things than some of the, say, 50 and 60 year olds that I’ve talked with is rather distressing to me.

Left out a thought. Bad me.

Lot of people amazed and mystified as to why, say, France and Russia, let alone anybody else, don’t support the US position. Other countries have their own interests, yknow, which don’t necessarily coincide with US interests, and in a lot of cases are pretty much opposite to them. Russian arms sales to Iraq, anyone? Way the world works. Get used to it.

So I’ve been marinating in Iraq war coverage for like, what, five days now or something? Seems like centuries now, for some reason. Keep coming up with random thoughts on the issue. Like you know how the first war was the “CNN war”? For my family, this one is going to be the “MSNBC war” for whatever that’s worth, which isn’t much.

So the White House is giving a press conference today, and they’re talking about humanitarian aid and how it’s hard getting it into Iraq because Iraq, yknow, mined the harbors. And these reporters are going on and on about the poor people of Iraq and how we’re not holding up our end of the deal and giving them aid. Like, hello? It’s pretty simple, really. The harbors are mined. The food is on ships. Ship + Mine = Sinking ship = no food. Really fucking amazing how that works, isn’t it? You know at the end of the day that the reporters asking those sorts of questions, and the ones about the explosions are pretty much against the war, but the way they’re going about protesting it smacks of either gross stupidity, or gross intellectual dishonesty in that they know the WHY full well, and are ignoring that to try and make the Administration look bad. Neither of them is all that palatable to me, the first for the obvious reasons, and the second because such is extremely unethical.

Speaking of which, another peeve of mine at the moment is the misguided belief that people, especially innocent civilians, are not going to die in this thing. They are. That’s tragic, but it happens. Smart bombs, for all that they’re amazingly accurate, do not always work 100%. Bullets are worse – they’re not guided by a whole lot, which makes you wonder about all that AA fire going off in Baghdad. Deliberate atrocities are the worst, and you’ll notice that those seem to be the realm of the Iraqis – heard about the uprising in Basra, or the fact they took over a fucking HOSPITAL? Go on, find me some evidence that the US/British forces are doing that sort of thing. No, inability to get food to people while the harbors are mined doesn’t count. Yknow, they’re trying, folks. Hard. But it doesn’t always work, and that needs to be realized.

There needs also to be a return to the realization that pacifism on anything other than an individual level is basically a failure for a number of reasons, not the least among them being that in the land of the disarmed, the armed man is king.

Along with that, there needs to be a certain realization of the way the world works. Geopolitics, if you will, as well as economics and a few other -ics and -isms and such. The first of those is that the United States as a whole, not just the rich, has interests in other countries. Gas prices are but one reflection of that. Sure, you can shout “no blood for oil!”, but you’ll certainly complain when gas prices go up to $5 a gallon. Another manifestation of that is the whole “Made in China” label. Along with that, there’s a certain few realities about applying the whole “Axis of Evil” idea, like how little bits of the world do not operate in vacuums.

All of that leads up to some sort of point. There is a reason why we are where we are now, and not in, say North Korea or Iran or Angola or something. Iraq is important because the regime there threatens our economic interests, which in the end affects the entire country and indeed much of the world. Iraq has also been chosen, instead of Korea or Iran, because firstly we have “legal”, and I put that in quotes more to call into question the role of international law than anything, rights here – Iraqi violation of the ceasefire and a host of UN resolutions. This isn’t present in Iran so far as I know, and only sort of in Korea. In Korea’s case, there’s a lot of worry about South Korea getting the crap beat out of it, which if you remember last time, it did. There’s also worries about what the Chinese are going to do, which if you remember last time, they got antsy last time we ran over North Korea. In Iran’s case, you’ll notice as how it doesn’t border much of anything, much less how, yknow, Iraq is right there, much less how Iran at least shows some kind of reform movement. We may yet go for those two, but not yet. As for Africa in general, we tried that once. If you’ve seen Blackhawk Down, you’ll know about how that turned out.

Slightly (or not so slightly) amoral? Yes, it is. But that’s how the real world works. Even America can’t fix everything for everyone, no matter how hard we try.

This concludes tonight’s rambling, disjointed rant.

One last note: Be careful which females you allow to play wargames. They…corrupt.