There has never been any question that the war in Iraq is not only a bad fucking idea but also unjust as hell: let’s see, first we give Saddam Hussein money in the 1970s and 1980s and provide him a nice, cushy margin to create his own little fiefdom where he can torture and kill his enemies with impunity, then we decide for some reason that it behooves us to destroy his government and try to “build democracy.” The layers of bullshit – from Irag = 9/11 through WMDs and right on into “nation building” – are so thick it is going to take historians decades to find an even vaguely coherent path through them.
It really doesn’t much matter to me at this point. It’s official: my niece is being deployed next July for “not more than 400 days.” Did I mention that her enlistment is up in August 2008?
Yes, I know, if you don’t want to fight in a war don’t join the service. I get that. No, there’s no draft or anything, not at all.
So while I have opposed the war all along for purely rational reasons – Iraq has nothing to do with 9/11 (do we even deserve “payback” for that?), we have no business interfering in the matters of another nation state (of course, to take that to the next step we’d need to stop propping up dictators all over the world), and after completely subverting the Constitution we’re certainly not qualified to tell anyone else how to build a republic – now the reason why it needs to stop as soon as possible is personal.
And the real kick in the ass is that what I can do to stop it remains exactly the same: absolutely nothing.