Eh, the midlands sucks. It's boring as hell. And their food....yuck. No worries...indeed.

NirvanaMan, I am currently unable to mojo you, but that post was certainly mojo worthy.

Well, sit down, because I agree with you. But we need an exit strategy and we need to get out. We aren't fixing anything, we aren't accomplishing anything other than killing and getting our own people killed. This *war* is endless. We came for the WMDs, there wern't any. We came to get Saddam out, we did that. We came to promote democracy, we're trying and failing. At some point, we need to just say ok, here is what we are going to do, and then we are going to have to leave.

We're ending up with a new generation of shell-shocked troops. In 20-30 years how many of these men and women will be the homeless vets we see on the corner, lives shattered because we jumped into something we had no way to get out of.

I am not ready to say we are failing at setting up democracy.

They have a constitution. The have had a national election with tremendous turnout.

This is what I find to be a bit amsuing. Many say we are trying to export "our form" of "western democracy" and are critical of that. Well, they've voted, and it certainly isn't going to be a western style democracy, so this is seen as failure.

I'm not remotely afraid. I was fightened with the inital attacks, then that ceased when I realised I was supposed to react that way- that's what they want and that's why they are called 'Terrorists'. I am not so stupid as to think my government would not use that fear to their advantage- historically, fear has been a great manipulator of civilizations and I see no reason to doubt that the powers that want to remain so would not hesitate to use this fear to their advantage. I would suspect the same of any party- it's human nature, and doesn't devolve along party lines. People in power are always seeking more, and any way they can. That's why we (supposedly) have a system of checks and balances.

Oh, and I owe you mojo, GC. :cool:

Well, we have to be a litte saavy about the media's spin, too.

It's come 360, btw. Contrary to NirvanaMan's picture of a consistently anti-IraqWar press ... the media were so anachronistically gung-ho, patriotic and Up-Bush's-A$$ for the first year or so of the conflict that I had to keep checking my watch to see what decade I was in.

Sure, now the mainstream press is calling it a quagmire, a civil war, a bloodbath. But at least there are reports of facts in there, upon which we can form some sort of informed conception. I'm not saying things aren't denied us or spun by the American media ... people who watch Al Jazeera probably get a wider view of things.

But bare facts are bare facts ... and if we are to believe the intregrity of reports from many sources that, for instance, 100-people-per-day have been dying violently in Baghdad for months now, I think we can paint our own picture of that part of Iraq - quite apart from either the media spin or the politico spin.

The uptick in violence in Baghdad coincided with our launch of a major military campaign to return order and security to that city. I don't need any spin to see, from the simple facts on the ground, that this campaign is a dismal failure, in a line of many dismal failures.

Last week began the trial of the soldiers who raped a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and then killed her and her family. We destroy entire cities like Fallujah, and the enemy simply melts away to regroup somewhere else. Then we utterly destroy the next town, while the enemy keeps surviving and eluding and regrouping elsewhere.

We can't be everywhere at once.

We can't defeat a guerilla insurgency with American military might.

We can't even quell an ongoing bloodbath in our occupied nation's capital ... with all the treasury-draining resources of the United States Armed Forces brought to bear.


I really don't need to hear opinions or spin one way or the other to see what's going on. This is really beyond all spin.

What about breast milk? That would be awkward..."Would you mind drinking that liquid before you cart it onto the plane, ma'am?" :p

People had to do it after 9/11.

I remember hearing about that happening once.

And here I thought breast milk came in the most secure containers of all.

Heaven forbid we feed a baby breast milk from a BREAST!