Anti-war folks

My spam account gets lots of e-mails from activist groups every day. Some want money, some provide news links, and some have petitions to sign. Over the last few days I've been getting petitions not to invade Iraq.

In the days after September 11 I went to some protests. I supported those who didn't want to invade Iraq. I mean every bit of evidence linking Iraq to AlQaeda was debunked as soon as it was created. Anyone paying attention could instantly discredit at least 60% of what Colon Powell said before the UN Security Council. Most of the rest might take a couple of hours. Anything else needed security clearance, but was easily questioned.

But those protesters and I were on opposite sides on the invasion of Afghanistan. Which was weird, because it wasn't long before that many of those people were supporting invading Afghanistan for women's rights causes. They were anti-war for any reason. It was wrong always and in all cases. While I saw that they were housing the real terrorists and that Saddam Hussein could be one of our greatest allies.

Syria is a tough call. Nasty evil brutal dictator on one hand and Muslim extremist terrorists on the other. If we could be sure the people who started the revolution were in control at the end it'd be great. But they've been pushed out by monsters.

More recently I've been watching the Russian invasion of The Ukraine. I don't want to invade and fight their war for them, but I do want to be asking "How can we help? Arms? Troops?"

Iraq is now being taken over by ISIS. While it may sound like a cartoon spy agency, ISIS is a terrorist group that makes AlQaeda look like moderate Muslims. Saddam would have been able to keep them out. He was brutal, but effective. Most of all he wasn't religious. Considering what he was fighting he had to be brutal. And we took him out and softened up the country for any future invaders. We tried to train them and hand control back to them, but clearly they're not ready for prime time, yet.

This is our fault. Remember how Afghanistan becoming a terrorist haven was because we walked away after helping them throw out the Soviets? Same thing here. We WILL have to take care of this eventually. Whether we do it when they're in Baghdad or not is the only real decision here. Believe me, I'm not thrilled about it. At least if we go in now we're working with the Iraq military instead of against the ISIS run Iraq military. We can send in supplemental forces instead of a whole damn army.

This is being branded a religious civil war. This is an invasion. They may not have a home country, but like every other conflict in the region, one side is manned with religious extremists coming in from outside the country. Some have been in country for a long time and infiltrated the cities to soften them up. That doesn't make them Iraqis. If this were internal it would have shown in the polls before now. It's a regional conflict acting as an internal struggle. These people are pulling arms, money, troops, and support from organized crime activities inside and outside of Iraq. Protection rackets and drugs and whatever else. We should at least be providing similar resources for Iraqis. And due to the corruption, we may need to provide people to keep the resources in the right hands. Maybe those smart guns that shop owners in the US are being threatened about if they dare sell them.