CHAPTER II - HOW DID THIS HAPPEN?

CHAPTER II

HOW you may ask DID ALL THIS HAPPEN?

Let's start with 911.

===========================================

911 was perpetrated upon the country of 
the United States by Middle East terrorists mostly from Saudi Arabia, NOT Iraq.

But then-U.S. President George W. Bush still had an old score to settle against Saddam Hussein. The embarrassment of his father during the 1st Iraq war.

The embarrassment if indeed there was any was the fault of the senior Bush, not Iraq. But facts never have been much of a factor in American Republican politics.

911 was a heaven-sent opportunity to take out someone he hated AND consolidate his power as U.S. President at the same time, and then the force of the office kicked in and they sold a bogus bill of goods on a gullible, hurting population. 

It is NO question that the 911 attacks had KICKED OUR BUTTS, scared us and made us paranoid and ill at ease.

Understandably so. The sickening pictures played OVER AND OVER ON TV of people jumping to their deaths in 
the World Trade Center, the pics of the plane which crashed in Pennsylvania, and the one that flew into the Pentagon...tore our hearts apart. People sat glued for hours and hours and hours...watching the same horrific pictures of the WORLD TRADE CENTER buildings being destroyed..over and over and over. 

I hope to GOD I NEVER see anything like that again.

Thus it was easy to sell a country SO overcome by fear and pain and the likes of Bush, being led by the greedy and manipulative Dick Cheney and the nutty Defense Department head, Don Rumsfeld...who took full advantage of the paralyzing fear and pain to settle an old score PLUS help their buds in the Military Industrial complex in America.

Scurrilous but real.

So off to war we went, drums playing marching songs...and we went based on faulty and outright 
wrong intelligence. We went BLAZING into Baghdad 
like a woman with PMS (with an arsenal of weapons). 
WE cared little that the justification for that war was pretty much ZILCH. We could have waited and done a more thorough job of vetting the intelligence...but no. We went HELL-BENT for leather into a quagmire of mis-applied military might...dangerous and often incredibly stupidly applied. The mistakes kept mounting such as the disbanding of the Iraq Military and then the shit really hit the fan.

Afghanistan was where Bin Laden, the REAL mastermind behind the 911 attacks, was in hiding. But of course our intrepid Bush and his minions blew that potential victory to smithereens...and as a traumatized nation sat in pain, watching this horror-comedy show of a war playing out...and the information that the weapons of mass destruction Hussein was supposed to have had was by now known to be undeniably WRONG (books cooked)...we began to question but it was too late. Nobody wanted to admit the error and kept defending the entry into Iraq. Many still do. UNBELIEVABLE but true. MANY STILL DO.

There was obviously NO justification for the Iraq war and to make matters worse, Saddam Hussein was an Arab to his toes and HATED Iran. He was a natural barrier to the Ayatollahs like Khomeini. But now HE was GONE and that was OUR fault and thus so was our insulation from the likes of then Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad...
 One of the biggest looney tunes to EVER run a country 
in the Middle East and there have been some real lulu's.

The longer this went on the worse it got...until Barack Obama became President and while he isn't and hasn't been perfect by a LONG shot, he did get Bin Laden...something despite ALL THE BLOODSHED, THE $$$ spent and frittered, Bush NEVER DID. NOR Rummy nor Cheney. They never tried that hard to be honest...
and it was NEVER all that important to them 
to do ANYTHING but exact retribution for the 
Senior Bush's embarrassment.

Thousands of Americans DIED, more thousands of Iraqis, and almost a TRILLION DOLLARS was spent on a fools errand...and this bunch of IDIOTS got away with it.

Even Obama never held them accountable, something 
I WILL NEVER forgive him for.

I think it is one of the things history will look back on and  will NOT be kind to Obama. The same is true with Wall Street and the near global economic collapse in 2007-2008. He AND Holder. I think they seemed far more concerned with their future potential job security 
than making CRIMINALS pay for their misdeeds.

NOW, we are mostly out of Iraq, and watching the devastation that some of us at least warned about is playing out BECAUSE WE DID NOT FINISH the job. Many in the Middle East FEARED that and they were right. We are great at STARTING shit, just not finishing it.

Next up it is feared will be Afghanistan and like the Russians and the Brits before us, my fear is that we will continue to make a MESS out of the Middle East...
EVEN THOUGH, THEY seem to be doing an admirable job of making devastating messies of it ALL BY THEMSELVES. They really don't need our help to do that anyway.

THEY have been fighting as I alluded to earlier EACH OTHER, for centuries. They can fight til the end of time, without our help. WHAT THEY NEED IS HELP TO FIND THE PEACE SO DESPERATELY NEEDED.

What they need, frankly, is the REST OF THE WORLD to stop dithering, sitting with collective fingers UP THEIR ASSES, and go in with A LARGE ENOUGH PRESENCE...to TAKE OUT ISIS/ISIL, the Taliban and the rest of the troublemakers...standing with the GOVERNMENTS in the region WITHOUT TAKING SIDES.

WE DO NOT need to be seen siding with Sunni, Shia, Kurds..we DO need to be seen siding with the PEOPLE of the Middle East as a WHOLE. THAT needs to be made clear FROM THE GIT-GO and it is one mistake we have made before such as in Iran and more recently Egypt, Libya, and Syria.

WE WILL HELP YOU, ALL OF YOU...NO FAVORITISM.

HELL...

WE SHOULD BE DEMANDING THESE FOOLS SIT DOWN AND TALK. NEGOTIATE, COMPROMISE, BARGAIN...and while likely nobody will be completely satisfied, there will be peace. FINALLY, an end to the bloodshed. OR we WILL keep wiping out and killing the perpetrators until they are all gone or DEAD. PERIOD.

-----------------------------------------------------------------

CHAPTER III 
PAKISTAN

"THE SHIFTING SANDS OF HELL"

by Dustybear

COPYRIGHT © 2015