Six More Shopping Days to the Infidels’ Holiday

For those who, like Senators Kerry and Edwards, were cowed by George W. Bush’s asinine question “Would you rather Saddam Hussein were still in power?”, we give you further evidence (in the form of multiple killings and kidnappings that left at least 67 iraqis dead today in Karbala and Najaf) that only around 51% of the American electorate, and seemingly no one else on the planet, would sincerely answer that question in the negative.
While Saddam’s regime was clearly brutal, it was orderly and staunchly opposed to, say, the theocrats of Iran, and hence, useful to us (at one time, of course). By Middle Eastern standards, it was a secular state, women had rights, gas was cheap, and people didn’t routinely get blown up while attending funerals.
Well, they do now.
What is ironic, of course, is that replacing the orderly Iraq with chaos, from which, the likeliest winner will be a form of Iran-aligned Shiite theocracy (after a predictably brutal all out civil war, which will be in full swing by the spring, as we redeploy after having declared victory and commencing draw down around Ground Hog Day) does us no good– no good whatsoever. Obviously, the principal threat to lives and well-beings Americans will face will be from the social collapse that will inevitably follow the economic collapse that our “make the tax cuts and unsusutainable deficits permanent” government is about to bring upon us (while those responsible retreat to the comfort of their gated communities and armed chauffeurs, leaving the rest of us to deal…) The real, though in probability terms comparatively small, existential threat from terrorists with bad-shit-weapons comes not from orderly tyrannies like Iraq (or even Iran or North Korea), but from failed-states/terrorist-vacuums like the former (and future) Afghanistan, seemingly large parts of (nuclear armed) Pakistan, and vast pockets of Africa (everywhere from the Sudan to Burundi to Sierra Leone to Congo), or even a place like narcocratic Colombia.
Hence… Iraq it was… Well, four more years, one more month and one more day… not that I’m counting, or anything…