September 11 again.
Last year, I was worried about how the world had remained a bloody, violent place since 2001 as the Syrian Civil War was well into its third year. It's now in its fourth, and due to the extremist group ISIL it's bled over back into neighboring Iraq which still hasn't recovered from the ill-planned Bush/Cheney occupation.
Last night Obama gave a speech outlining how we were committing airstrikes against the Islamist State psychopaths. We are remaking military commitments to a nation we tried to exit back in 2011, mostly because we as a nation failed to leave Iraq in better shape than when we invaded it in 2003. Mostly because we dove head-first into a Middle East quagmire out of anger and blind rage.
We had no reason to invade Iraq in response to what Bin Laden did to us on 9/11. The reasons were fabricated by a Bush/Cheney administration that wanted to invade Iraq for other objectives (finishing off Saddam, placating our allies in the region who didn't like having a dictator for a neighbor, seizing all that oil and natural resources). We had no plan for what to do with nation-building. Well, there was a plan: remove Saddam and his ilk, put in pet Chalabi on the throne, sign up all the oil rights, exit Iraq. When it happened that nobody in Iraq wanted Chalabi and he wasn't the puppy Cheney thought he was, it turned out we had no Plan B.
Because with the Middle East there IS no Plan B. Just an ongoing, 5000-year cycle of violence and madness that will only end when everybody's dead.
And we are all stuck. The innocent people in the Middle East trapped between warring factions. Other nations tied to the region through all that damn oil. A United States that's morally and politically obligated to keep dropping itself into that quagmire because we've been breaking things there since World War II and we're stuck paying the bills for the next century.
We're bombing away in Iraq today. Because the Towers fell thirteen years ago. We have no idea when we can stop bombing.
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