Greetings Earthlings!

"[We] have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honor. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiqués are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows. It is a disgrace to our [national] record and may soon be too inflamed for any ordinary cure. We are today not far from a disaster. Our unfortunate troops ... under hard conditions of climate and supply are policing an immense area, paying dearly every day in lives for the willfully wrong policy of the civil administration in Baghdad but the responsibility, in this case, is not on the army which has acted only upon the request of the civil authorities."

T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia)
The Sunday Times, August 1920

I dont like to be too political here because I dont think the internet tends to intelligent discourse on this subject. People feel more likely to attack and and rant madly because it can be so anonymous. But when I saw this quote wandering the web the other night I felt it deserved comment.

I am very conflicted about the war in Iraq. While I was very against going in the first place, but I dont think we can just pull out in a hurry now that we are there. Karl von Clausewitz said that "War is nothing more than the continuation of politics by other means." I am afraid far too many politicians believe this. Sending men to die should be the action of last resort. I have had too many of my cousins serve in the Army and the Air Force to feel sending them somewhere without a well thought out plan of attack and withdrawal does not serve our military well. We also cannot sustain the current level of troop deployments. The National Guard wasnt meant to be used as much as they have called upon to do and now they are having trouble keeping those they have. Also the main source of recruits they had (recently discharged members of the service) are no longer as willing to sign up because they dont want to go back into Iraq.

It is just sad that we havent learned by all the countries that have tried to "fix' the middle east countries that it dosent work. They dont trust us and I dont blame them.

Few thoughts by others wiser than I.....

"There has never been a protracted war from which a country has benefited."
--Sun Tzu ((ca. 500 BC))

"War is like a big machine that no one really knows how to run and when it gets out of control it ends up destroying the things you thought you were fighting for, and a lot of other things you kinda forgot you had."
-- Anonymous

"The past is prophetic in that it asserts loudly that wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows."
-- Martin Luther King, Jr.