forget about “american interests” in iraq

nowadays some people say that we should not pull out of iraq completely because there are certain “american interests” in iraq that need to be protected. if you allow them to make their argument fully, they often come right out and say that blood for oil is a good idea and they support it. that’s right, they actually say that our troops should be fighting and dying so that american consumers have access to cheap oil from iraq. that is one of several “american interests” in iraq that supposedly needs to be protected. well, pardon me for being so blunt, but why the hell should anyone give a damn about american interests in iraq? there are like 200 countries in the fricken world. do we have young people fight and die to protect american interests in all 200 of them? no. apparently, only one country is that important, and it is iraq. ok, so maybe it is 2, and we can add afghanistan to the mix. but those are the only 2 where we actually put our own troops on the line to fight and die for our supposed interests. but which american interests are these? are these the best interests of america? or are they simply the lowest common denominator? are they simply the lust for greed and power? is it simply the fact that we americans want something for nothing, and we want to buy stuff at a cheap price and sell stuff at an expensive price? see, hillary clinton and probably half the other democratic presidential candidates, along with probably all the republican ones except ron paul, are all proponents of this theory that the united states has vital national security interests that can only be protected by having troops fighting and dying in iraq. sure, that may be the case right now, because that is where we are doing the fighting right now. but look at it this way. it is really expensive for us to pay for sending people all the way around the world to iraq from here in america, and to have them learn all about the culture and try to learn how to fight a war there, and ship them equipment and try and rebuild a country at the same time as destroying it. now imagine if the terrorists had to fight us here in the united states. they would be the ones who had to spend all the money to come here and learn about our culture so they can fit in and not be suspicious and find out the weak points in our security before we do. that would make it much, much more difficult for them to kill americans. right now the terrorists are killing us on the cheap and it is working, because we are doing it in their backyard and they know the lay of the land and they speak the language and practice the religion of the locals. but if we trick the terrorists into having to come all the way to the united states, imagine how much money they will be wasting! now, we will probably be able to catch them, because they are all poor, uneducated, stupid people. even if they can avoid being caught, they will probably be too stupid to pull anything off successfully. the truth is, the terrorists got lucky on 9/11. that plan could have easily failed, many different ways. the odds were probably very much against the plot of 9/11 succeeding. it required too many terrorists to do too much suspicious activity and it had to all go undetected, and norad and the air force had to fail to defend our sky against hijacked planes, and the terrorists had to actually have good enough flying skills to fly planes into buildings. if you really multiply out the probabilities, the probability of everything going right was very low, but it still happened. why? simply because there were many other terrorist plots that failed. this just happened to be the one that succeeded. if the terrorists keep having one plot after another against us, eventually one of the plots is bound to be successful. it is like the old saying about even a stopped clock being right twice a day. if we prepare our nation for being attacked by terrorists, we can probably foil most plots, but we can never be completely foolproof, because most terrorists are quite stupid individuals, or else they would not be dumb enough to volunteer for a suicide mission. stupid people have a way of finding the kinks in a system that smart people would be unable to find due to overthinking the situation and less of a willingness to take irrational risks. the irrational risk-taking of stupid terrorists, in a way, makes them more dangerous than highly intelligent terrorists might be. but then again, it might be fairly easy for the terrorists to attack america. all they have to do is come here, and because of the lax gun control laws, they can buy automatic machine guns and then go to public areas and use them. and why do we have such a big, obvious hole in our national security? why are people like the virginia tech killer able to get guns? it is because of the corrupting influence of lobbyists in washington, who have been able to prevent any sensible gun control legislation from coming to effect to prevent senseless tragedies of mass murderers going on shooting sprees. lobbyists do all sorts of awful things. and they are never held accountable like politicians are. you know who else is not held accountable? journalists. people who do shoddy reporting are all too often not punished for it. the news media completely failed during the months leading up to the united states invasion of iraq, and this invasion would probably not have happened if the news media had been covering things critically since the invasion talk started in august 2002 with the psychotic ramblings of dick cheney about saddam hussein being hell-bent on developing nuclear bombs. now, to be fair, saddam hussein did want to develop nuclear bombs, but his nuclear program was stalled and not going anywhere, and everyone close to saddam hussein lied to him all the time and only told him good things, because saddam hussein was a shoot-the-messenger type who hated to hear bad news. saddam hussein’s own insanity prevented his nuclear program from developing any further. but anyway, it is obvious that the best way to fight this war on terrorism is on the defensive, not the offensive. terrorists in iraq can plant improvised explosive devices in the roads at night to blow up our tanks, and live to fight another day. in iraq, terrorists do not have to pay with their lives every time they attack us. if we make them come here to attack us, then terrorists will have to die every time they try to kill. so they will never get to be repeat offenders. then, who will want to be a terrorist, if they know that all it will earn them is ending up dead? only people with severe mental problems, who are both suicidal and homicidal as well as devoutly muslim, will be willing to sign up. and those mental problems will have to last long and be fairly stable, which means very strong fanaticism. if we focused more on propaganda efforts in the middle east and less on military efforts, things might be going better. the more we spend on propaganda in the middle east, the better. i think it would practically be impossible to spend too much on propaganda in the middle east, unless we started getting into the range of over 90% of arab muslims loving and greatly admiring both the united states and israel. if we got to that point, it would be safe to say that maybe we spent a little too much on the propaganda. but up until that point, i say, increase the funding for propaganda, and diversify our propaganda offerings. iraq has like, hundreds of different newspapers. bribe as many newspaper owners as possible and get as many as possible to print nothing but pro-american propaganda. and do the same for all the arab satellite tv channels, like al jazeera. if we throw enough money at this problem, we can bribe everyone, and then nobody will be printing anti-american stories in newspapers or having anti-american propaganda on the tv. and the same thing goes for hugo chavez and venezuela. with enough money, we can simply buy hugo chavez and get him to be our buddy and run venezuela the way we like. why do you think hugo chavez has so many allies in latin america? they were all bribed! he paid them all off, with the money he made off venezuelan petroleum sales. nobody understands the business of bribing better than hugo chavez, and every man has his price. now where, you ask, will we get the money for all of this bribery? very simple: we steal the money back from them after bribing their politicians and media outlets, using our corporations to do all the fancy business dealings to get the money back. we can end up making a profit off the whole venture. making the muslims of the world like us again could prove to be an extremely profitable business venture, and it would put an end to terrorism too. think of all the savings, all of the money we waste fighting terrorism that we could save by eliminating the terrorism before we have to even spend any money fighting against it in the first place! once the muslims of the world are on our side, they will turn the terrorists in, and rat them out for a reward! we just need to perfect our propaganda technique. we need actual imams preaching from the koran that are saying how wonderful the united states is. we need to be bribing the islamic fundamentalist preachers to preach pro-american islamic bullshit. bribe as many people as possible! instead of democratizing the middle east, we ought to make it as corrupt as possible through widespread bribery. and then we can bribe our way into controlling opec and getting the price of oil to be as low as we want it. and instead of letting the terrorists make money off opium poppies, we can be corrupt and sell licenses to grow opium poppies freely in afghanistan without being bothered by any law enforcement. we can be the ones who take bribes as well as the ones who give them! through this type of corruption, we could become true masters of the middle east. and that would all cost far less than having our troops over there fighting and dying. in fact, if our government took enough bribes, we could make more money than we spend on the whole deal, and come out ahead. that is the best way to protect any so-called “american interests” in iraq. but fighting a war over there? no thanks. the longer we fight, the worse it gets. when you find yourself in a hole you dug, maybe it is time to stop digging. we got into this problem through too much war-fighting. we certainly cannot solve it through war-fighting, because the more of that we do, the worse we make the problem. we are trying to use military troops to win the hearts and minds of a civilian population that is under military occupation, an occupation that is supposedly necessary only because the civilian population is offering such unusually strong resistance, but the more we fight against the resistance, the stronger the resistance gets, and it has gotten to the point where there is a civil war between different factions of the resistance at the same time they are fighting us, and still, they are winning and we are losing. it is insanity to think the best way to win over a civilian population in the opinion polls is through an aggressive military occupation. but, that is still our strategy in iraq, and why we are losing. in reality, we do not need to have anything to do with the nation of iraq if we do not want to. we could cut off all ties to iraq and withdraw everyone we have there, and just abandon our embassy and the green zone and everything, and we would probably be better off afterwards, having done that, than if we desperately try to hold onto everything we still have over there. iraq does not belong to us and we should stop acting like it does. it is its own nation and it is time for us to learn to leave iraq alone and stop interfering in iraq’s internal affairs. i mean, we accuse iran of interfering in iraq’s internal affairs. what is wrong with that? we do far more of it than iran does, so if there is something wrong with it, then both the united states and iran should stop. and that is exactly the position that i take on that issue, that all external nations should stop interfering in internal iraqi affairs, including the united states, and that we should do this regardless of what any iraqis tell us. we cannot let them grow dependent on us. we are the ones making them dependent on us, and we have to just stop doing it. disagreements between sunnis and shiites are not our problem. let the crazy muslims solve their own problems, without our troublesome meddling that only makes things worse. if the sunnis and shiites are all so crazy that they can’t stop themselves from killing each other, then what can we do to stop them? nothing. let them find sanity on their own. we cannot give them brains. they would have to be undead zombies for that to work. and everyone knows that in the middle east, the undead are made into mummies, not zombies, or at least that is what they do in egypt. zombies are primarily made in haiti and other caribbean islands. that is why we cannot stop the fighting between sunnis and shiites, and why we should leave iraq. now, if zombies were made in egypt, it would be a different story. and don’t even get me started on vampires made in transylvania. we in the united states need to develop our own type of undead, in order to stay globally competitive with transylvania, haiti, and egypt. but that is a whole ’nother story.