Cocktail Hour of the Doomed Occupation of Iraq

[Warren Stupidity]

So it is graduation season and thus I get dragged out my mom's basement in my bathrobe and coffee stained t-shirt and pj bottoms to make the usual rounds of social events, which being a blogbarian I am just no good at. So some other aging techy gravitates towards me and we get into the usual what do you dos and he does spy satellite imaging for some defense firm, a fate I have avoided so far. So the problem they are working on is differencing Iraqi road snapshots to play spot the IED.

"Hmmm", I says after a moments incredulous reflection, "but aren't the roads changing pretty much all the time?"

"Well yes and of course the camera is not exactly steady either".

So it turns out that this program is pretty much useless, and that even in the cases where they have found anything there is a rather quick feedback loop and the planting techniques simply adapt to the surveillance, (of course). But meanwhile my acquaintance has a job and can feed his kids and we taxpayers are subsidizing all of this and somehow it all keeps our economy going and, like the sausage factory, you just don't want to look too closely at how it all works.

But aside from the ethics there is the massive corruption. An insane amount of money is going into this program and thousands of others just like it. We are pouring our nation's resources into this idiotic and doomed occupation. The naive think that they can find technical solutions to the fundamental problem that the Iraqis live there and have no where else to go, while we do not live there and can leave at any time. We cannot 'win the occupation', despite the vast resources that are being poured into this, the people living in Iraq will continue to kill us as best they can until we leave.

They learn quickly how not to get spotted by the flyover satellites and drones. They learn our routes and our methods, our weaknesses and our habits, and they have all the time in the world. The naive think that there is a solution, a program, a policy, a redeployment, a surge a fix for what is broken, perhaps a better management team to shuffle the deck chairs. Those who are not so naive, those who can still honestly assess the situation know that we are just marking time with the dead until the clock runs out in 2009.

[Rydz777]

1. Sadly, your last sentence says it all, sums up the irrationality

of a failed policy continued out of arrogance, stubbornness,ignorance, and delusion. It will be no easier to leave next year, or the year after, or the year after that. So common sense says we should leave now, and every day we fail to do so we pay a price in the lives and limbs of our troops.