In Iraq, we are apparently vaguely disappointed to not be blowing it up anymore:
Mr. Kerry’s visit to Iraq on Sunday was the first by an American secretary of state since 2009. He came at a time when concerns are growing over Iraq’s role in the crisis in Syria, and when the United States’ influence in Iraq has been dwindling.
The State Department has been sharply reducing its huge presence here, and its diplomats have seemed powerless to affect the course of events on two of Washington’s pressing concerns: Iraqi tolerance for the Iranian weapons shipments to Syria and issuance of arrest warrants for certain Sunni leaders by the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government.
The Obama administration has appeared to be less engaged in Iraq in recent months, as it has sought to “normalize” relations, and the Iraqis have distanced themselves from their former occupiers. And there is a sense among many Iraqi officials that the Americans are no longer willing to marshal the influence they still have.
“The Americans are not using claws or teeth,” Mowaffak al-Rubaie, Mr. Maliki’s former national security adviser, said shortly before Mr. Kerry’s visit.
Well, it worked out so wonderfully last time we tried it. I mean, in all seriousness, are we the assholes for blowing up the country and making grand promises and then not doing anything about them? Absolutely. Would continuing to do so actually change anything? Absolutely not, and while I’m not crazy about the idea that we are just gonna forget all about this war until it takes a big karmic bite out of our ass and we go through another round of “why do they hate us” 20 years from now, you tell me what would be the best alternative here. GTFO is the worst policy, except for all the other ones:
American promises to help shape a stable democracy in Syria have been met with skepticism by some Iraqi officials. In an interview late in 2012, Sheikh Humam Hamoudi, the chairman of the Iraqi Parliament’s foreign affairs committee, recalled a visit in September from A. Elizabeth Jones, the acting assistant secretary of state forNear Eastern Affairs. “What she said was that they would educate the Syrians on how to be a democracy,” Mr. Hamoudi said, adding with a hint of sarcasm, “just like what happened in Iraq.”
A.
I’d say GTFO is the second-worst option, ahead of practically every other option. The only option I’d rate above GTFO is GTFO and give the Iraqis a butt-load of money or manpower to do public works.
How many takers do you think we’d have for U.S. citizens to go over to Iraq and provide some reparations? Young people looking to do electrical or plumbing apprenticeships? A thousand? Ten thousand? How valuable would it be to them (and to us, when they come back) to spend six months or a year in Iraq learning a useful trade? I’ll bet we could even pay them a tax-free annual salary in the mid to high five figures and *still* bring it in for less money than we spend per month on our military occupation. We’d even have something to show for it when it’s all said and done: professional tradespeople with marketable skills.
After all this time, after all the fact finding and studies, after finally getting rid of that pimple of a President GWB, after having HRC at state for the last four years, the best we can come up with is an idiot who uses a letter for a first name spouting some outright BS as in we will “…educate the Syrians on how to be a democracy” to the very same people we gang-banged with our democracy. Great flying spagetti-monster in the sky can’t we PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, do better than that??!!