lots

There's tons I want to blog about, but not tons of time to blog.
Maybe this Saturday?
by then the things I want to say about the whole Petraus/Crocker hearings will be irrelevant, but maybe my temper will have cooled down by then too. I mean, who says "Sunni Arab"???? Sunni is a religious term, Arab is an ethnic term...they are not used together except by uninformed people. It disturbs me that a man who is "leading" our armed forces on the ground in Iraq uses a phrase like that.

Also, I'm tired of hearing about how factions within Islam are the only religious groups in Iraq or anywhere else in the middle east. It's just not true. There are Christians, there are Zoroastrians, there are some other small minority religious groups, and guess what? They're all persecuted like crazy. No to mention Kurds, who get no mention at all; even when there's talk of "partition" they only talked about Sunnis and Shiites. News flash: Iraq is more diverse than we give it credit for. Where's the US military for those other people? Somewhere else, apparently. Talking about "Sunni Arabs" as though that's even a thing. And saying things that come out sounding an awful lot like "we can't leave because it would force the Iraqis to work together and that wouldn't be good." I mean, really. You went into a country where you didn't understand the culture or language or really anything else, and now that it's all falling apart (or fallen apart, as the case may be) you're talking about how they don't work together the way we do...well duh...and that it's better not to have an authoritarian government (which is sort of true but culturally not true because strong authority is a key value in Arab culture) but eventually they'll do things "our way" (one of them actually said that). Honestly.

One more thing. I'll be the first to admit I don't understand all the complexities of this, but I have a basic logic question. IF "Al Qaeda in Iraq" is in fact linked to Al Qaeda the original, THEN doesn't it make sense that spending resources dismantling (the polite way to say killing, unfortunately, since we can't seem to see any nonviolent way to dismantle anything) Al Qaeda the original would ultimately put a stop to AQI? If there's no command central, then organizations like that (particularly in the middle east where authoritarianism is valued) tend to crumble, right? So we could actually solve the AQI problem by focusing on Afghanistan? I have yet to hear a convincing argument against this, though it must be out there in the ether I don't understand...otherwise, wouldn't we be doing that? I can't be the only one who's thought of this.

Okay, so apparently I let all of that out today instead of Saturday. But there's more, about other stuff, so that will have to wait because now I have to do some work. ta.