Tweet
I really love owning my own home but since it is once again property tax time I am feeling like getting in touch with my country's founding fathers and tossing tea in the local harbor or something. I am more then a little miffed at State Prop 13 since it freezes property tax values at the time of purchase; that means that while I must pay $6k per year my elderly neighbor only has to pay around $500 per year for the same model. I can't help but be pissed about getting the short end of the stick ($5500 per year shorter) on this one. Hell, I could almost pay a year’s worth of payments on a new BMW with that money. It might be enough to cause me to reconsider my center-left politics if it wasn't for the fact that the Republican Party is filled with corrupt bastards like Delay, Frist, and Cunningham.
In other news yesterday I went out on a date with a really great woman. I'm thinking Baltimore can't be as bad as everyone says since it produced such a wonderfully down to Earth person. Lastly, this month marks one year since I got back from Iraq. In the last year I've done a bit of soul searching and I've decided that while I am proud to have served in Iraq and I don't feel I have done anything I will look back upon with regret I am now more convinced then ever that the whole thing was a mistake.
I honestly do believe Bush intentionally exaggerated the WMD intelligence reports in order to trump up a casus belli and Cheney's claims that a secular nationalist dictator, like Saddam, was going to help the same Islamic Fundamentalist groups he'd spent 30 years repressing just doesn't pass the laugh test. That 49% American population still falsely believes Saddam had something to do with 9/11 says something about the worldliness and intelligence of the American people as well as the effectiveness of the Administration's disinformation machine. We're now in a no win situation; if we stay we fan the nationalist flames to expel the invaders yet shortly after the foreign troops are withdrawn the country is going to descend into civil war. The reality is the best we can do is arm one side prior to our departure and hope "our" guys win. The Iraqi people are in for a long period of low intensity civil war similar to post-Soviet Afghanistan or 80's El Salvador. That doesn't make them better off nor does that help fight Islamic Fundamentalism or the terrorism it creates.
Saddam was a brutal dictator and it is good he no longer in a position to harm others, however, the world is filled with a lot of brutal dictators and at the end of the day I'm afraid we've caused more harm then good in Iraq. We haven’t helped make life better for the average Iraqi and we haven’t made the west safer against terrorism, exactly the opposite.
In other news yesterday I went out on a date with a really great woman. I'm thinking Baltimore can't be as bad as everyone says since it produced such a wonderfully down to Earth person. Lastly, this month marks one year since I got back from Iraq. In the last year I've done a bit of soul searching and I've decided that while I am proud to have served in Iraq and I don't feel I have done anything I will look back upon with regret I am now more convinced then ever that the whole thing was a mistake.
I honestly do believe Bush intentionally exaggerated the WMD intelligence reports in order to trump up a casus belli and Cheney's claims that a secular nationalist dictator, like Saddam, was going to help the same Islamic Fundamentalist groups he'd spent 30 years repressing just doesn't pass the laugh test. That 49% American population still falsely believes Saddam had something to do with 9/11 says something about the worldliness and intelligence of the American people as well as the effectiveness of the Administration's disinformation machine. We're now in a no win situation; if we stay we fan the nationalist flames to expel the invaders yet shortly after the foreign troops are withdrawn the country is going to descend into civil war. The reality is the best we can do is arm one side prior to our departure and hope "our" guys win. The Iraqi people are in for a long period of low intensity civil war similar to post-Soviet Afghanistan or 80's El Salvador. That doesn't make them better off nor does that help fight Islamic Fundamentalism or the terrorism it creates.
Saddam was a brutal dictator and it is good he no longer in a position to harm others, however, the world is filled with a lot of brutal dictators and at the end of the day I'm afraid we've caused more harm then good in Iraq. We haven’t helped make life better for the average Iraqi and we haven’t made the west safer against terrorism, exactly the opposite.
Comment