These Wars We Got Going On

We gotta get ourselves out of Afghanistan and Iraq. The US don't got the resources or the political will to keep losing slowly. Obama is a nice young man, and it would be a shame for him to have W's albatrosses hang around his neck as well.

Why do we seem to repeat the mistakes of European empires, some decades later? Cuba repeated Spain, Vietnam repeated France, Iraq and Afghanistan repeat the British. Do we have a historic copy-cat tendency for destructively bad ideas? The idea of stabilizing Central Asia & the Middle East is just that, an idea. Iraq is not Germany and Afghanistan is not Japan. We haven't "beaten" anyone, who is now sulking in the corner, and after a good cry, they and we will dance around the maypole of economic resuscitation. No, that just ain't gonna happen. It's getting old reading how XYZ Iraqis or Afghans were killed in A bombing, and B number of our (or NATO's) troops were killed in turn, and tomorrow we'll bomb group C in retaliation. C'mon guys. Let's all go home.

The world is plenty f'ed up in other places. They still have slaves in Mauritania, the Zimbabweans are plain starving, the Russians are becoming like the Nazis in the 1930s, and the North Koreans are a bad Orwellian farce. Shall we be dealing with them next? I don't relish the thought. We haven't the guns, we haven't the troops, we haven't the money, and quite frankly the shopping list of domestic problems is long enough without our "foreign interests". Isolationism is one thing - unproductive and outright ignorant - but there is something to be said about gathering our rosebuds while we may. Think about how easy universal healthcare would be to fund if we were literally blowing up that money half a world away. Think about how we could modernize our infrastructure if we were pouring billions on billions into the sieves that are the failed states we quagmire ourselves in. Think about the renovations to our domestic industrial sector we could work if we diverted comparative pocket change from the military/industrial complex. It boggles the mind.

I'd like our country to take a bit of proaction, rather than wait for more fireworks to go off. Do we really need bombs and bullets to wake us up? And even if, haven't we gotten the message already? Oy vey!