No Progress

Today Tami is reading: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6451731/

OK, so what this article is saying is that Fallujah (no matter how you spell it) has been a hot bed of insurgents. People kidnapped by these insurgents were being held in inhuman, torturous conditions. There were records kept about who the hostages were.

So, the same as before we invaded, right? Only maybe on a slightly larger scale because of the car bombs?

I fail to see how this war is helping the Iraqis. Their country is less safe now than it was under a terrible dictator. We can invade Fallujah, but the insurgents will just flee to another location. We cannot possibly think to have enough troops to occupy all of Iraq, and even the thought of that is more terrifying than the thought of a Saddam still in power.

I was trying to think how to wrap this entry up, how to come up with some sort of spin of what I think we should do in order to make things better, but I don't have one. I honestly believe that all we can do is get our butts the heck out of that country and leave the Iraqis with a broken nation in more upheaval than they really thought possible. Maybe I'm not giving the other side a fair shake - maybe staying in Iraq and chasing insurgents from city to city, from stronghold to stronghold is the way to go. I suppose that we could view it as our responsibility to be the de-facto police force, since we were the ones who dismantled the police force that they had in the first place. So we stay, and we police, just as reviled as the brute force we've replaced.

There's no way out of this that I can see, nor can I see that the people we claim to be liberating are any better off. Where's a plan that makes sense, where's the progress?