This last week I decided to get my mind around whatever is happening in Iraq. It's all rather confusing as to who hates who and why. As soon as we befriend one side, they go and start killing anyone who is not like them. For a while we didn't like the Sunnis as they kept blowing us up, so we helped the Shiites out till it got out of hand. Now the Sunnis still hate us and continue to blow us up, and the Shiites are armed and running about anyone who rubs them wrong, namely Sunnis and other Shiites who disagree with their federalist or anti-federalist ideas. Yes, democracy over there would be nice, but frankly, I wonder if there are just too many guns over there to sort it out.

Just saying 'I told you this shit would happen,' as I have been for months now, isn't really a forward-looking answer. I believe that you need institutions before you set up a working democracy, which is not going to happen in Iraq any time soon. We might be there awhile till things settle down and people start voting with ballots rather than militias. We need to keep engaged as every alternative I come up with scares the crap out of me, and if for nothing else, we need to keep oil flowing out of the country.

It's all very ugly, but we must make the best of a bad situation. It's going to be like this for some time, and I think that it is about time we realize that we can't just pull out all of our troops and be done with it. It's going to take years, and even after all that we may still lose in some sort of Vietnam-style way. But if we manage to keep Iraq from breaking up into three or four pieces, then I would say we did the best we could.