I dropped this in a comment box yesterday near the end of a discussion. Nobody responded to it. But I need to throw it out there, for what it’s worth:

What makes us think that Iraq will ever be able to stand on its own, without us propping them up?

Saddam kept things stable by being a ruthless S.O.B. that all factions were scared of. Now the hatred between the factions (Sunnis, Shi’ites, Kurds, Al Qaeda, Mujahadeen-e-Khalq, etc.) some of which is CENTURIES old, is going to continue. Democratic rulers do not inspire fear into the hearts of men willing to kill for their cause.

Add to that the fact the Islam is an essentially political religious system, and we will never maintain a Western-style democracy there while any orthodoxy remains. Sharia law will eventually become the norm, and Iraq will likely increasingly resemble its Shi’ite neighbor, Iran.

Meanwhile, we’ll continue spending ourselves into oblivion. We are shelling out nearly $1 billion a week just to get enough JP-8 fuel into Iraq to keep our military running. How are we paying for this? By borrowing money from other nations. We have to borrow, of course, because we’re not only $9.3 trillion in the tank in on-the-books debt, but we’re $53 trillion deep in obligations once Social Security and Medicare are factored in.

Oh, and Medicare? This is the first year the program is taking in less money that it spends. By 2019, the entire system is going to crash, because it will take every single dollar of federal revenue just to maintain that one program. That means nothing goes anywhere else - defense, infrastructure, maintenance of government - nada.

And foreign governments aren’t going to keep lending us money, because our dollar is worth less every day. Canada, home of institutionalized mediocrity, has experienced a dollar equal to our own for the first time in my life, for heaven’s sake.

And when we can’t use our dollars in foreign markets because it’s not worth anything, what will we do? We have no manufacturing base left, no domestic energy infrastructure, no distributed agriculture system…everything is produced and shipped from somewhere else, more often than not from overseas.

We need to wise up, and fast. Call it isolationism if you want, but we need to start bringing troops home ASAP and begin focusing on domestic defense rather than strategic globalism. We need to reign in spending. We need to rekindle our manufacturing base. We need to shore up our trade deficit. We need to stop printing money and fix the dollar.

If we go broke - and it looks like we’re about to - we can’t fix anybody’s house. A fireman is useless if there’s no water running through the hose. War used to help our economy, but now it helps all the countries that comprise the war engine. How many of the parts of our military might (vehicles, tech components, ammo) are made in some other country?

Iraq’s government has to step up, and it will have no better impetus to do so than knowing precisely when we will take our ball and go home. Staying indefinitely just makes them co-dependent and weak.

It’s time to do something drastic.

Filed under: Bankrupting America, Iraq, Politics, Rants