Iraqi Emplacement
Photo Source: NASA

Here we are, years after the invasion of Iraq, in an expensive and cruel war. When the war started, many of my friends were glad that we were getting rid of Saddam and his weapons of mass destruction. This is the same Saddam that the U.S. had given weapons to a few years before. We had the whole Iraqi scenario right in front of us, all we had to do was look at Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia. was very much like Iraq. It was a country that had a dominant leader. He wasn't removed, but died. Upon his death old wounds came to the forefront and strife began anew. Somehow he had managed to hold this strife in check during his tenure. Saddam Hussein was different from Tito in many ways. Tito had been a hero in World War II, leading his soldiers against the Germans and had led his country so well that it had been the most successful of all the iron curtain countries. Saddam was a different type of man, he killed his enemies and sometimes his friends and many of the people in the area were considered by him to be enemies and were exterminated. Yugoslavia. had three primary groups of people that disliked each other. There were the Serbs, Croatians and Slovenes. To make matters worse, there were religious hatreds. The area has three main religions, Serb Orthodox, Muslim and Roman Catholic. The hate was just as bad there as it is between the parties in Iraq. I think we all remember that the region broke out into war over ancient hatreds after Tito's death and the resulting mess was much like Iraq. The difference here was that there didn't seem to be any outside influence in that area stirring the pot, as they say and the trouble started on its own not because of anything we did.

What did we learn from the Yugoslavia experience? It seems that we learned nothing. We took on a country that we knew we could devastate in a war and grabbed its leader, who was a despot, there was no denying that and never gave a thought to anything else. We knew that terrorism was growing in the middle east, yet we couldn't figure out that the situation that we created in Iraq would be taken advantage of. The people that, excuse the use of this word, planned the war certainly were not Mensa members. It looks to me like they may have flunked out of grammar school. Almost everything that has happened in Iraq was predictable. All the old hatreds are back with different moslem sects killing each other and outsiders showing them how to do it more efficiently. American military men are caught in the middle of this turmoil and they can do no right. How many stories do you see where our military helps the ordinary Iraqi people? It happens, but it is just not news and never gets printed. Al-Qaeda would have you think that we are devils in uniform. No one ever seems to mention the fact that thousands of people were killed and tortured under Saddam.

Iraq
Photo Source: NOAA

We definitely are our own worst enemy. We talk about torture and even bring it to the floor of the Senate and House. A few rotten apples use the prisoners as some sort of sex toys and when they get caught, the officers blame the enlisted men and the lowest ranking ones get convicted. When I was in the military, it was the officer that gave the orders and everyone under him that carried out the order that got punished if it was an illegal order. My oh my how things have changed. We sometimes treat things so naively. Show me a country in this world that would not torture, what they believed to be, a terrorist if they thought he possessed info that might stop a terrorist attack and I will have to say that you are wrong. This kind of stuff always went on, even with the Geneva Convention rules. The difference between us and everyone else is that we debate it in public. The rest of the world considers us morons for doing this and laughs at us behind our back. I bet even the terrorists are amazed at our stupidity.

I have given this a great deal of thought and I believe there is no way out of our current situation unless we completely abandon our current middle east policy and it might even be too late for that. We let the nuclear genie out of the bottle, we made it possible for groups and even single persons to become as strong as only countries formerly were. There is so much radioactive material missing from all over the world that it is only a matter of time before groups get some of it. There are also certain individuals in other countries that now posses nuclear weapons and are not beyond sneaking them to their brethren. This may have even happened already. We know that this country is a sieve, where things can easily pass into. Don't believe that stuff that we are safe, far from it. Just the ports alone present a chance for a device of any kind to be smuggled in. When you only check about 3% of the containers coming into the country, the chance of being discovered is greatly reduced and when you use the container of a respected company the chances are even lessened, maybe to zero.

Atomic Explosion
Photo Source: DOE

If a nuclear device or devices were to detonate in the U.S., what would happen next? I can not predict exactly what the government's reaction would be, but I will say this, I would not want to be a middle eastern country. It is true that terrorists might acquire a few warheads, but they have no way of matching the arsenal of nuclear weapons that the U.S. possesses. I think that many mid eastern countries would cease to exist, blown out of existence. The terrorists think that since they are not a country, that we don't have a target to retaliate on. They are so far from wrong that it isn't funny. I am sure that we have our lists of countries that will disappear if this happens. The problem is that we will surely be warned not to retaliate by other countries or face more nuclear strikes. We will do it anyway and probably target these countries as well and if they fire on us, we will fire on them. We could be facing what is know as the end of technology. Some humans would always survive, but they might be living in a stone age environment.

Unfortunately for us, it is too late to just get out of Iraq. If we did that it would just be taken over by countries like Iran and Syria and another state that hates us would be created. So what do we do? This is the million dollar question folks, WHAT DO WE DO? I guess the first thing to do would be to look and see if a situation that resembled this was ever satisfactorily ended. If there was, then we could try and settle this the same way. I am not about to research this now, but our so called mid eastern experts should know. If not, then we have even a bigger problem. I don't think that the UN would ever take over in Iraq because the member countries don't want anything to do with that debacle. One can't blame them, why go into Iraq and become a target themselves? You can almost guess what the demands would be that were made on us and this country will never accept them. They will never accept the current situation. This will take a smarter and more informed man than me to figure out. We have all sorts of educated people in this country that claim to know all about that area of the world. Does anyone in power ever listen to anything that they say? It sure doesn't look that way. A good start would be to figure some way that the Israelis and Palestinians could really reach an accord. This has been talked about forever, but has never been attained. They both would have to agree to abide by some sort of impartial and binding arbitration. Maybe if this problem could be solved first, the other problems would be easier to fix.

I am afraid that if this doesn't happen, that nothing will settle the turmoil in the region short of God coming down on a cloud and settling this business for good. We must concentrate on settling the violence or we are going to find ourselves in World War III. The situation now is much more dangerous than the cold war.