The US "Nation Building" Exercise

The election has me too depressed to want to rant on about the idiocy on the campaign trail today, so I thought I'd take a look at the Iraq/Iran/Afghanistan mess that BushCo has created.

Last weekend a suicide bomber attacked a convoy, and seriously injured several Canadian soldiers - and killed a diplomat in Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, in Iraq, amidst the ongoing car bombings and other violence in that nation, the electoral officials have thrown out the ballots from 227 voting stations. I did a double take on this one myself. We aren't talking about 227 ballots - no we are talking about all the ballots from 227 voting stations. Presumably hundreds, or even thousands of ballots have been discarded as a result.

So, here we have the US government involved in wars on two fronts - both Afghanistan and Iraq, and although BushCo has been talking about "success" in these two countries, it's quite clear that the local resistance has very different ideas.

Meanwhile, the drums of war start to beat in Iran's general direction.

I said this before the US went into Iraq - replacing a government with a radically new structure is a very long term project. Not one that is going to resolve in a year or two, but is going to take generations to stabilize - likely time periods on order of the duration of the British occupation of India.

Sure enough, the work has turned into the messy, dreary drudge of stabilizing a war zone in a culture that the US military hasn't taken the time to understand. (Wow - big surprise there), so now BushCo turns its sights on other conquests.