Circumstance is cruel

I find myself, from time to time, feeling sorry for ol' GW. I think it is preposterous to think that he wished this stinking mess to happen like it has happened. The idea that some how he and his brethren wish an endless engagement in Iraq. Oh many companies have made out like bandits, and that is what they are. But that is the nature of all wars. Some get rich while some die. There has never been a war where people didn't try to make an extra buck. From selling faulty arms in the Civil War, to bogus contracts in WWII, to Haliburton today.

Still circumstance is cruel. The circumstances that poor decisions have brought about do not care what God a President prays to or does not pray to. The cold mathematics of cause and effect simply grind out the present based on what you put into the past. And war, the most brutal of human actions, itself propagates so many unintended consequences that the perpetrator of war quickly loses control of his policy like Frankenstein losing control of his monster.

Remember Frankenstein did not wish to create a monster. He wished to do a greater good. Circumstances were beyond his control. So circumstances that he brought about, in the personification of his monster, led to his own destruction. Evil never leads to good. The best that can be hoped for is that the evil of war ends quickly. But it seldom does end quickly.

Look at the first Gulf War. We all think of it ending quickly and painlessly, but it did not end. Desert Storm was followed by a series of small engagements, a no fly zone, brutal sanctions, the most expensive post-invasion rebuilding plan since WWII, and the eventual invasion of Iraq in 2003, led by many of the same people responsible for the first Gulf War. Indeed in fifty years when the real history is written they will probably bracket 1991 and whenever we end the dilema of Iraq within a single conflict.