My urge is to scale back as traffic has fallen during the general decline of blogs. And I'm sure I'll do that at some point. But I just haven't felt like giving in to the social media trend and stopping or even moving to social media.
I started on GeoCities and in late 2004 moved to Blogger. Sadly, a good amount of blog posts from early years were lost. I thought I'd managed to save them but I can't seem to restore them. Oh well. History's loss!
My first post on July 12, 2002 was on Iraq. I calculated that we'd quickly take Baghdad--I still remember the paper map and counters I made to run rough simulations. I think I eventually threw that out.
And my goal for the invasion is still my goal:
Although some Americans must remain in a multi-national force to solidify the victory with a successful peace, we will need to withdraw much of the heavy armor to be prepared to deal with an aggressive North Korea or some unanticipated threat. A democratic, rule of law-based, decentralized Iraq will be our ultimate objective.
I did not anticipate an insurgency by the minority Sunni Arabs that could restore Saddam's clan to power. Our rapid conventional victory reinforced my feeling that the Sunni Arabs were too demoralized to support an insurgency.
But I did not anticipate that al Qaeda and Iran would essentially invade Iraq and get away with it, funneling in Sunni jihadis funneled through Iran's vassal Syria and supplying pro-Iran Shias from Iran.
And I anticipated more allied help on the ground.
Still, we defeated the many threats over the years, even after pulling out in 2011 in victory but returning in 2014 to defeat the revived Sunni Arab terrorists and to block the rise of Iran in the wake of the Sunni threat.
Today we are still resisting the Iranians although the Sunni terrorists are mostly defeated now. To defeat both fully we still need to bolster the voting established in Iraq with rule of law.
I hope we remain in Iraq and manage to get that rule of law going with a little more local support before another 18 years pass.
And I hope to God that we don't pull out of Afghanistan at the risk of losing our Afghani allies who fight jihadis every day. Afghanistan needs our support. If we can do it without troops on the ground, I won't oppose that. But we certainly didn't manage to do that in Iraq during 2012 and 2013. Things can go bad that fast.
Neither Iraq nor Afghanistan are ideal allies or places. But they are far better as imperfect allies due to the sacrifice of Americans and our coalition allies, as well as the greater sacrifices of Iraqis and Afghanis who have fought common enemies at our side. And both places can be better. With time and with reduced effort over that time. Given enough time, they could be as prosperous and ungrateful as the French or Germans!
Thank you for reading. Sorry I still don't allow comments. But I think the rise of social media shows why I don't want to do that.
