Junto Boys

MESS-O-POTAMIA

Sure, there is oil in Iraq, but to declare that the sole cause of this war is, to borrow a poker term, first level thinking. The free trade of oil on the world market is something we are extremely dependent on and it is not so heinous as libs would have you believe that it is worth a good fight to keep this precious resource from being horded behind the turban curtain. It's not like we go around stealing oil, for god's sake - we just want the opportunity to purchase it at market price, even though we are fully aware that those profits will be turned into ammunition to use against us.

With second level thinking, the cause to war becomes clearer. There is a civilization sharing our planet that has gotten rich by mistake, just by serendipitously finding vast oil reserves under their sand, and one of the ways they choose to spend this windfall is by financing the extermination of us and our allies. We ignored this fight until it came to us and even the libs rallied to the cause and as usual, America kicked ass and took names. The fact that we have not been attacked at home in six years since should be regarded as a great victory but for some reason is not. We are engaging the enemy far from home with an all-volunteer army which has made the hoi polloi back home grow soft and yearn for peace. Since the war is not here and the cessation of it would seemingly make no daily difference to the unwashed masses, they have joined together in a great cry for withdrawal. Note the term surrender is never employed.

Only with third level thinking can we see that a continued presence in Iraq is vastly preferential to withdrawal. It goes back to Iran, 1979. There used to be sane Muslims in charge of that great country. All of a sudden, the crazies took over and threw the entire region into turmoil. Iraq tried to capitalize on the turmoil and we helped them do it, even though they were just a different strain of crazy. We couldn't bring down the new Iranian leadership via Iraq and by 1990, Iraq itself was getting too big for its britches and we had to bitch slap them a couple of times. Meanwhile, those cold war stalwarts, the Russkies were getting huge in Afghanistan and we financed an offshoot batch of nutjobs to drive out the Reds. Now there was a new wing of wackos getting big for their britches and they dug into Afghanistan. We've been playing whack-a-mole now for decades in the Middle East.

The people of the Islamic world are wonderful people as individuals but they are stuck in an historical rut of going from bad dictator to worse. Although every culture will fight for its way of life, you gotta figure nobody enjoys living under a tyrant. Maybe it is all they know and they can't imagine the alternative, but I'm one of those cowboys who truly believes we are doing a great service to the people of the Middle East when we fight the man for them. Unlike the Russkies, we are not going to move in and take the resources, we simply want to liberate the resources so that we can engage in free trade.

Anyways, I've got to go soon, so I won't belabor my point. I mainly wanted to point out the hilarity in the closing paragraph of the news story I linked above:

If Blackwater and other private contractors are shut out of Iraq, Democrats in Congress and Iranian intelligence operatives may have stumbled on a way to end the Iraq War—less than a week after Gen. Petraeus testified that the U.S. is turning the corner.

Who is the enemy in this story? It seems to be the American general who is fighting the good fight. And who are his antagonists? You guessed it, that great axis of evil, the Iranians and the Congressional Democrats. Together, they are unstoppable.