What are we doing in Iraq?

I mean, really! What are we doing? This is freakin’ incredible. We invade a sovereign country that wasn’t immediately threatening us, we don’t find the WMD that we based our entire argument for the invasion, there was not a connection with Bin Laden or any terrorist organization before the war (but there sure as hell is now!), we say we are “fighting the terrorists” but all I see is about 75% of the violence is Sunni vs. Shia and the other 25% is real terrorists just waiting around to strike at targets of opportunity. We cannot be seen as coming down on one side or the other in the civil sectarian strife, or else we will never accomplish anything until we are out of there because at least one of the powerful sections of Iraqi society will be aligned against us (if they aren’t already). Our third hand justification that “Saddam was an evil despotic dictator who tortured his own people” would sound a heck of a lot more convincing if we didn’t torture Iraqi people as well, without trail, without consul, with nothing more than a suspicion.

Now, it comes out that squads of Marines may have gone out and slaughtered dozens of civilians as revenge for the killing of one of their people, another soldier is on trial for murder, and now, we have one and probably more involved in the stalking, raping, and murder of a 15 year old girl, along with the murder of the rest of her family.

I’ll tell you, I wouldn’t blame the rest of the world if they never believed anything the U.S. said ever again. We are such hypocrites, which maybe wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t for the fact that we have absolutely no idea what the hell we are doing. All we do is justify, in very offended and offensive terms, whatever the heck happens.

I feel very sorry for the military people that are put in these situations. I truly hope that the people responsible for these atrocities are held accountable, so that perhaps our presence over there will become intolerable to everyone. Then everyone can come home and we can try to work on things that truly matter. Like working on better security for our ports and nuclear facilities.