The Duke

Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington who defeated Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815, and later became a Tory Prime Minister of Great Britain once said when confronted with the chickenhawks of his day, that "Great nations do not have small wars". You know when the shootin' starts shit can get outa hand, or words to that effect.

I mean the hornets are buzzing and the stings are going to leave more than welts on your elbow. As you tuck little Keegen, or Madison, or fuckin' Ashley into bed this evening ask yourself what life for them might be like 10 years for now. Wars can escalate, especially in the part of the world where we are currently engaged. That's where I'm coming from, yo. Here's where you can agree with your conservative friends Iraq is not Vietnam. Really? No shit.

Vietnam was a tiny little geostrategic backwater at the time and we had 500,000 people there at the height of it. We've got less than half that in Iraq now in the most volatile region on the planet. On the cheap, this is how they went about it, oh and off budget too. We keep having to pass these emergency spending bills this way everybody is complicit and those that don't wanna play along well, you can accuse them of not supporting the troops. Sound at all familiar.

Right, right. Great nations, small wars, huzzah, huzzah, freedom, freedom, freedom, stay the course, stay the course, yada, yada, yada. Hope is neither a strategy or a plan and that's all this administration is really going with. No constitution yesterday, so we'll hold our breath until next Monday, the 22nd, when the Iraqi drafting committee is supposed to report out a draft constitution that 2/3 of the Parliament can get down with. And hilarity, as they say, will ensue. There's supposed to be a further series of elections over the next couple of months, but really, unless you're paid to how can anyone keep up with this shit.

Now, no matter what these elections produce, which, let's face it is likely to be more chaos and enmity among the Kurds, Shia, and Sunnis, we are getting out of there for the most part beginning in the Spring. For a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the 2006 midterm elections in this country. No, no not all 138,000 of 'em (in addition to a division or two around each election to totally lock the place down) but I bet half will be back by Labor Day 2006. The other half- well, holed up in the desert out by the Baghdad Airport in a semi-permanent base that will be in operation for 20 years. Also, the type of deployments our Army and Marines are engaged in are no longer sustainable. Our armed forces are half the size they were 35 years ago. Hell, 40% of the people over there now are reservists. And they are not happy and at some point it becomes illegal to deploy them any further. Again, if we had been attacked by these people none of this would be even an issue. Laws would be changed, sacrifices would be asked of all of us. But that's not the case here, the only ones being asked to sacrifice are the people in uniform and their families, while the tax cuts continue to bleed the Treasury down to it's lowest revenues as a percentage of GDP since 1959.

Wars change not only the nation on whose soil the battles take place, it changes the nation whose warriors return from those battles. Remember Gulf War I gave us Timothy McVeigh and John Muhammed (the DC area sniper) and those boys hardly saw any combat at all, ground operations lasted 100 hours. We're coming up on 2 1/2 years of intense urban combat a hideous grinding stalemate in a place that in a word, sucks.

And if you're a liberal, or a news outlet other than Faux News, or Bill Clinton - well, it's all your fuckin' fault, motherfuckahs.

God, that's enough for now. I gotta go.