Thoughts on the Disaster That We Call Iraq

Happy Friday.

After work tonight I'm going to Conquest Brewing to sample some beer and some local BBQ from Yellow Dog BBQ. I'll have a review/recap of that over at Fig this weekend. By the way, the folks at Fig have been really nice to me, and they have a great little thing going. If you're a Columbia person, consider checking out Fig every once in awhile...but I digress. My (mostly depressing) thoughts on Iraq are below the jump.

Anyway, to my thoughts on the disaster in Iraq.

If you've seen the news recently, you're aware that Iraq is now basically in a state of sectarian civil war, with Sunni militants and jihadi-type extremists on one side, and the Shia Government of Iraq on the other.

The Sunni militants/jihadis have essentially routed the Iraqi army, and now have control of most of the northern part of Iraq. Baghdad is now possibly about to be under attack, and the Iraqi government isn't looking too strong. Fallujah, Tikrit, and Mosul are now at least partially or wholly out of the control of the Iraqi government.

To sum up: It's really bad. What should we do?

Well, there's certainly plenty of blame to go around. Obviously, people on the left will still blame Bush for starting the Iraq war in the first place. And they have a point. So they don't feel obliged to do much at this juncture. Obviously, people on the right will blame Obama for not aggressively negotiating a SOFA agreement to allow the US to at least maintain a presence in Iraq. They have a point, also. Similarly, they don't feel obliged to do much, either.

However, no one has a time machine, and we can't go back and change history. We are Here, and there are no good decisions Here. In fact, Here is a very bad place to be. Basically, no one has much incentive to do anything, because there's no "ownership" of the problem.

Obama has now just said that there will be "No US ground forces." I guess that means he's still open to dropping bombs on people from the sky. Maybe.

However, I'm not sure that sending in any amount of military will do anything other than to kill people and break things. It's not going to "solve" the conflict. It might end it because it's tough to have a conflict if the US comes in and bombs the ever-living crap out of everyone. But ending the conflict isn't the same thing as solving it.

Ultimately, the Iraqi people have to figure out a way to live together or to live separately. Maybe the Sunnis and Shias need a divorce. Maybe they shouldn't have been forced to live together by the British at the end of WWI to begin with. All I know is that there don't seem to be a lot of happy campers over in Iraq.Maybe they need to establish separate states and leave each other be. They certainly don't seem to be capable of living together unless a dictator (like Saddam) is in charge and just rules the whole place with an iron fist.

The sheer amount of American blood soaked into the sand over there makes the country's descent into civil war (or whatever you want to call it) even more tragic. I'm sure our military folks are looking on and wondering what the hell was the point of doing what they did.

The Iraqis have to figure out how they want to live with this. We can't solve this problem for them. They had a stable government for a little while, and they messed it up. Maybe we should have known better than to get involved in the first place, or maybe we should have known better than to just leave all of a sudden, but there's plenty of blame to go around.