. . . or does anyone else see this coming?<\/p>\n
Even I, a peacenik from way back, have to admit: we can’t leave Iraq. Ever. No matter how bad it gets. So the Iraqis turn out to be unredeemably venal and corrupt, a nation of murderers bent on ethnically cleansing themselves out of existence. So what? We can’t leave. Our self interest (i.e., our oil-based economy) dictates that we stay.<\/p>\n
Okay, so?<\/p>\n
My nightmare runs something like this: we leave the cities, and the Iraqis, to burn. We redeploy US forces to more defensible positions: Iraq’s oilfields, pipelines, and shipping facilities. We bring in thousands of American contractors – because we won’t be able to trust or tolerate a single Iraqi employee – to run the oil operation. We redeploy remaining troops to Afghanistan.<\/p>\n
Hell, we even bring in Bush and Cheney – by then mercifully out of office – to run the oil operation.<\/p>\n
Anybody else see this coming? Or is it just me?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
. . . or does anyone else see this coming? Even I, a peacenik from way back, have to admit: we can’t leave Iraq. Ever. No matter how bad it gets. So the Iraqis turn out to be unredeemably venal and corrupt, a nation of murderers bent on ethnically cleansing themselves out of existence. So […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,14,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-207","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events","category-military","category-war"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=207"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=207"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=207"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=207"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}