This might go better in GQ, but let’s face it: EVERYTHING about this war’ll turn into a debate. More likely ranting than great, but a debate nonetheless.
This morning (Or, looking at the clock, yesterday, 6/19), I was sitting in a room with about a thousand other people while a professor of middle-east politics and history discussed his speciality at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis at the end of a one-week summer seminar. Since there ended up being about 10 people (including himself and myself) there who actually cared what he had to say, we got into a decent deal of discussion after the first twenty minutes. Since I figured him to be another right-wing facist warmongerer* like most of the other speakers they had that week (all the professors were fairly moderate except the ones they had give speeches), I didn’t write down his name, and I was too timid to ask after I decided it was worthwhile, but I’m sure that you can contact them somewhere from the USNA’s website and ask. That’s the best I can do as a cite.
Anyway, there was a great deal of other things that were unbelivably enlightening, and some that made me ashamed of our last three presidents. You’ll never hear any of this stuff on the news, and it probably won’t be in history books for a long, long time. That’s a whole six or seven other threads, though, and I’ll deal with them when the spirit moves me without draining all the energy from my body. But there is one particular thing that really stuck in my mind.
He claimed that we were attacking Iraq so we could move troops from Saudi Arabia to Iraq. We’ve wanted to do that since we discovered in '95 that AQ bombed the World Trade Center in '93, and we just needed something that would scare Americans shitless so that the president could do anything they wanted to there (I.E., 9/11). Saddam wasn’t a threat to anyone except Kuwait ever, so we needed to have soldiers nearby to talk him out of it. The prof. couldn’t answer why they weren’t in Kuwait itself, or why they retreated deeper into SA, away from it, after attacks on the troops by Saudi Guerellias, and he admitted that Hussein hadn’t done anything wrong in the past dozen years, and he had good reasons even then, but there are some matters of politics I don’t think anyone understands. My guess is that the government thinks we do need a solid base of operations in the middle east to hold troops, which I kind of agree with.
So now, in a roundabout way that I don’t think anyone out-of-the-know could have understood, we’ve dealt with the grievance of OBL. In his theory, this takes away Al-Quaeda’s problem with the US, the rest of the Arab world, especially Iran, is happy with us for going after the Taliban (the whole ME’s wanted to since the Taliban took over, but we held them back. They killed a few diplomats in a rather grisly manner), and once Israel-Palestine has a clue, the whole place’ll be enlightened given fifty to a hundred years.
Now this almost makes sense, in the crazy way of everything we do away from home works (Consistent Illogic defined), but America’s screwed up pretty well everything we’ve done there in the long run. There are those unanswered questions two paragraphs ago about how we got there in the first place, and whether or not this will work, but it seems reasonable enough to me.
However, there are hoardes of people here who are smarter than me and have more free time. Given the one piece of the puzzle nobody’d ever get, I need somebody to at least help me along in the gigantic “what the hell are we doing?” of it all. What will go wrong, what can, what are the chances this won’t come around and bite us in the ass ten years down the road… just give me a massive why and how.
And because I woke up 20 hours ago, goodnight.
*Of course, for the first twenty minutes, before he gave up on it, he insulted Clinton whenever he heard snoring. The resulting cheers were loud enough that the podium shook. About four hundred of the attendees were back to sleep within three minutes or less, and the cycle repeated once it became hard to hear him.