Iraq, Mr. President, is a failed state. It failed when we toppled Saddam.

IT ALL STARTED WITH GERTRUDE BELL AND HER DAMN MAP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Gertrude_Bell : The lady who, from the remnants of the crumbled Ottoman Empire, drew the national boundaries of Iraq. She split the Shi'ite tribes into Iranian and Iraqi with a line on a map and a flag design.
Churchill refused to call Iran and Iraq nations, he called them, "tribes with flags."

I knew there was a way I could blame this war on a woman! I don't know why not; George is blaming the war on the Iraqis. You know Hitler blamed the German people for falling short of his vision of the Third Reich.





I get so sick, sick, sick, of hearing, "we cannot afford to let Iraq become a failed state." Woes of the Failed State" has become the new song sung by the same tired old Republican singers: Bush, Cheney, McCain, and Graham.
O.K., then, "what is a successful state?"
Is it one in which Disney Baghdad opens for business in 2014, or 2022, or 2055? A secure country where American Airlines runs two hundred tourist flights a day in and out of Baghdad International? (at the cost of how many American lives, and how many trillions of dollars? Yes, I said trillions-- good bye health care, good bye Social Security, good bye, your children's future -- Hello, inflation. Hello, nine dollar a gallon gas and the eleven dollar hamburger. DON'T THINK IT CAN'T HAPPEN).
You ask, "how do we accomplish that? I mean, peace in the Middle East?"
Think about it; I MEAN REALLY THINK ABOUT IT. (quit thinking about that Genii in a lamp -- we won't find one ).
Let's consider the obstacles: First, Iraq had a population of twenty plus million, over two million Iraqi citizens have fled the country, that's over ten percent of the population. These were the wealthy Iraqis. They had the means to flee, so they did, taking their education and money with them. Yes, the educated class of Iraq is now gone, just the thugs and the poor left. Secondly, it is estimated by a Johns Hopkins survey group, the number of war dead is approaching one million. God only knows how many orphans, how many injured, how many injured orphans, and how many of those left blame somebody for their losses. I know if my brother, mother, or father were killed, maimed, or disfigured, I would want some payback, an eye and a tooth for starters.
Are these, perhaps, the "dead enders" our vice president talked about once, before he realized there was no dead end on our freeway to hell. No, it will be war without end for us if we stay, but do realize, we will not stay.
Keep in mind, the Iraqi natives do not have to win against us, they only have to wait till we go home, then they will claim to have won--without winning a single battle (and who said this was not like Vietnam)).
Forcing America out is only one of the goals of those who live there. The insurgents, foreign fighters, Sunni, Shi'ite will all have difficult goals after we're gone. Goals in the Middle East have always been reached by overcoming difficult obstacles, and each obstacle has been hurdled by killing people. Life is cheap in the Middle East, cheaper than oil.
So, to get back on point, how many maimed and mad? As a guess (and this is only a reasoned guess), two million. That is a grand total for maimed, mad, dead, and gone -- five million.
Another five million are hiding, afraid to come out. They are the young, the old, the doctor, the shopkeeper, the artist, the peaceful. They will come out only a few minutes a day to collect what is necessary to live -- food, water, maybe some gas for lamps or generators. They will then go home and pray no one kicks down their door, and also pray for peace.
The remaining ten million Iraqis live in areas of Iraq which are the quiet, successful provinces. Some of them are rebuilding. The Kurds in the north of Iraq are a success story. They are happy Saddam is gone.
Most all are happy Saddam is gone, especially the Shi'ite. If you remember, Saddam kept the Shi'ite down on the farm, groveling for a bit of the oil revenue, buying and selling rugs, cowering in fear of Saddam's army, his warrior class of thugs, his Republican Guard.
The Shi'ite are now armed, black-eyed crazy, and fanatically unafraid. They are also willing to commit genocide against the Sunni to control Iraq's oil riches. For the Sunni, it is the fight of their lives, and the unspoken truth is we are on their side. We realize an emboldened and radicalized Shi'ite Iraqi population will join with their Iranian brothers, who are also Shi'ite. Then the Iranian and Iraqi Shi'ite will join forces with their Syrian and Lebanese brothers, who are the Hezbollah Shi'ite. This Shi'ite superpower will turn against the Iraqi, Kuwaiti, and Saudi Arabian Sunni. Once this war has been waged and many, many have died, Iran will have been weakened, Iraq destroyed, Tehran and Riyadh will be in flames, the Kurds in Turkey and Kurdistan will be emboldened to move against the oilfields in the south of Iraq. The Saudis will welcome their help (the Saudis have enough oil). The Iranians will ask the Russians to intervene, and they will, then........I don't want to think about then.
Why did we do this? I mean, really? Will someone please lock that dumb motherfucker of a president of ours up. Please. Good Gravy!

Hey, J.F.K., you got lucky; Nikita blinked first. (oct. 16-oct.24, 1962--that's when prayer REALLY counted.)

I can remember during the Cuban missile crisis the nuns packed us up and sent us home to "be with our families should things take a turn for the worse." Of course, this was after things had taken a turn for the worse. I hated school and was glad to go home. But something didn't feel right. It wasn't a "snow day" kind of feeling. As we left school, Sister Beatrice yelled after us, "tell your parents it's either beads or bombs!!"

The ten minute "Duck and Cover" clip began to play during cartoon time. Captain Kangaroo talked about what to do when the bright flash of light came; it was more of a tearful goodbye. Mister GreenJeans walked off stage in the middle of Kangaroo's advice; his eyes filled with tears. The world was coming quickly to an end. Everybody was calm though, brave souls waiting for the fireing squad, waiting for Nikita to say "do svidaniya" to diplomacy. We watched Kennedy on T.V. as our troops gathered in Florida, as our B-52's, loaded to the teeth with bombs, winged away to Moscow, Kiev, Minsk, Vladivostok, to Armageddon.

I lived a few blocks from the church. The church doors stayed unlocked in those days, even at night. At all times during those twelve days in October, the church was filled with people praying the rosary, over and over -- twelve days and nights. And when it was over, they knew it was not the wisdom and restraint of world leaders that saved us, but only prayer. Prayers for mercy rose like thick, sweet incense to the gates of heaven. The Catholics in our church negotiated with and prayed to God's mother, Mary -- not to God himself. God would have let the bombs fly. God wanted to smell the blood of matyrs, not the mellifluous stench of the whispered prayers of penitent cowards. But God's mother urged him not to, not just yet, not today.

Back then, people seldom locked their doors. At night, my parents never locked the front door.

"We don't have anything. Why would anyone rob us? Unless they wanted the kids, and they can have them for all I care," he would say, then laugh.

Nobody was laughing at the prospect of global thermonuclear war.

I went outside and watched for a "big boy" looking bomb to come puttering across the sky with our Air National Guard jets following behind it, shooting at it. I worried they would hit the explosive part and the thing would blow -- this concept would later be known as "air burst."

I wondered what it would be like to burn to death. My little brother wandered outside in only his diaper. He watched me examine the empty sky, the whole time holding his bottle in his mouth. He didn't know, but I did. I was seven years old. He was just a kid.

When I started Rosie Picture I hoped I wouldn't become enslaved to commenting on current events. But with the death of Saddam, I couldn't help myself.

Yes, I do have the talking head syndrome.

I have many feelings about the death of Saddam. It will be for the crowd growing up a moment in time which will stick in their collective memory like the deaths of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. stuck for us. They will answer questions about 9/11 and the death of Saddam the way we answered and still answer, and the way our grandparents answered to the memory of the bombing of Pearl Harbor: "I was in fifth grade," or, "we was riding home from school, and my mother bypassed the black neighborhood," or, "I came out of the movie and a man saw my uniform and yelled, ' get back to your barracks, soldier, America's being attacked."'

Even though today Saddam's death seems the most important event in history with rumbling repercussions ripping through the most significant time in written history. Let me assure you; it is not. After some time has passed, the rumbling will only be the memory of thunder, the sky will still be dark. It will still be rainining.

I would hate to be George Bush when historians finish with him. I suspect our modern day Herodotus will note Saddam's execution was the most expensive in history. The way I figure it: thirty feet of rope x 600 billion (very low estimate) = 20 billion a foot, or almost two billion dollars an inch the American people paid for that rope. We could also measure it in lives -- but what's the point?

And George, where were you? Oh, hiding from a thunderstorm in an armored car in Crawford. George, you should have flown back to your other hiding place; you remember, the mountain you hid under while events unfolded on 9/11. Yes, you were in your undisclosed location in some western state. Remember? After you finished reading, "My pet goat?" while New York City was under attack, while the Pentagon burned, while the Senate stood on the steps of the Capital singing "God bless America?"

You know Saddam's body is going to be given to his family. (mistake!) They will take him, dress him like a hero, lay him in a nice hardwood coffin, put his solid gold Uzi in the coffin with him. His family and the Sunni will mourn. Great T.V., but not good for us. The Shi'ite will go crazy. What's wrong with the way Mussolini ended up? And his girlfriend too.

Now, if I had it to do (not that anyone would ever let me have it to do), I would have beheaded Saddam, picked his head up and shown him his body, watched his eyes widen and blink like crazy, watched him gasp for unavailable air, but not for mercy -- even he would know. (I read once during the French Revolution, when people were being beheaded right and left, there was a scientific sort who was to meet his end by the guillotine. He told his friend he would blink once a second for as long as he could after his head was severed from his body, and for his friend to count the blinks -- there were seventeen of them. What a U-tube clip that would be!)

And finally, after Saddam was no more, I would find a beautiful young Shi'ite girl who hated Saddam, maybe he would have killed her father and her mother in front of her, then raped her. I would encourage her to do a dance of joy in the blood of Saddam. Lots of pics of his blood on her dance slippers. Then throw his body to the dogs in the street. But we won't do that. We are too civilized, too politically correct, too nice-- nothing wrong with that, but it doesn't win wars .