It's like 150,000 soliders, when all you need is Allah.

The title of today's post comes from a song by Alanis Morissette. She sang it in reply to Nouri al-Maliki, the deft leader in Iraq who recently said:

"We say in full confidence that we are able, God willing, to take the responsibility completely in running the security file if the international forces withdraw at any time they want,"

Does anyone else see the irony between being confident and having faith in God? How can you possibly “say in full confidence” that your government forces are prepared to take over the country yet leave room for God to interfere? Or is Maliki another leader who communicates with God?

This may be the cynic in me talking but Iraq is fucked. I don't think there's any viable military or political solution. Even if we withdraw all of the troops and the Iraqis are ready to take over, there will be no democracy -(which I think was one of the many excuses for invading the country in the first place and one of the more fortuitous obstacles impeding our attempts at "nation building"). As we have seen in many other countries around the globe at various times throughout history, democracy is something that cannot be forced upon a culture. Some Iraqis may want an open, transparent society, while others may want a moderate theocracy, and still others (namely al-Qaeda and its affiliates) would like an authoritarian theocracy. With several competing factions vying to establish the political ideology of the post-Saddam Iraq and seemingly little will to compromise, the diagnosis for the country is dire. Democracy is something that needs to be embodied by the people and it also needs to be something for the people. There is no way you can call Iraq a democracy without ridding it of al-Qaeda, which would ironically (and presumably) entail a more rigid method of a terrorist crack down. To rid the country of al-Qaeda would be to rid the country of its attempts to become democratic.

In 1939, the State Department (our own government! FDR nonetheless!) lauded Mussolini's Fascist achievements in Italy by claiming his government "brought order out of chaos, discipline out of license, and solvency out of bankruptcy." Those are some pretty nice words for a Nazi puppet regime. I can foresee a day when al-Maliki or some other stooge is praised in such a way for bringing "peace" to Iraq.

Basically what GWBush did to Iraq when he invaded, is not dissimilar to a drunken douchebag reliving his frat boy days by blacking out, sticking his balls on someone's chin, and brushing their teeth with his dick. Thanks to Michael Cera for the genius of that quote.

Patrick Henry once said, "Give me liberty or give me death." Well, the Iraqis are getting alot of death and very little liberty.