gushiggins: It is good to be home, yes. As far as fighting the war solely for oil, I disagree. Every day there were reports of sabotage on the oil pipelines, and how the sabotage was impossible to prevent because the pipelines ran through so many miles of almost-uninhabited desert. As it is, we're paying the tribes living closest to the lines to protect them, but in a country where a popular saying is, "My brother and I against our cousin, the three of us against our neighbor, and the four of us against the world," the trust is not being put in trustworthy hands. Even if America's motives were purely altruistic, there would still be major setbacks to reconstruction merely because we are outside occupiers. It will not be until Iraq is truly on its own feet (whenever that may be) that their oil industry will be truly productive, if then. If we were really just going after the oil, we would be utilizing the vast majority of our manpower to patrolling the pipelines and producing the oil ourselves.
That being said, I believe the only reason we're over there now is our government believes that extricating ourselves would look like defeat, which it probably would. I do believe that we do have to set up a sovereign, viable government there before we leave because to not do so would horribly destabilize an already volatile region of the world; however, to do that, the UN is desparately needed. I'm all for anything that saves the biggest amount of lives, and right now, getting the UN involved seems to be the best way. If not, the nascent Iraqi government will probably be deemed illegitimate by its own populace because of the heavy American influence, and our troops will be right back there, but this time in the middle of a real civil war.
On a lighter note, after spending over a year there, I can't believe that solar harvesting panels haven't been set up all over the region. 340 non-cloudy days a year? Temperatures of 140 and above? People are going after the wrong natural resource.
-Z
