I Hate The War

"You just think you know everything."

I love the hate mail when it's like that.  It just makes me laugh.

That statement could apply to many people.  It doesn't apply to me.  Few are plagued by self-doubt as often as I am.  Today, I was in a conversation with an angry friend (mad at me and another person) and she only grew madder as I refused to spit out replies rapid fire.  I'm not known for offering snap judgments -- unless I'm on limited time and a friend's showing me their work and they need a quick opinion on why a scene's not working or whatever.

When I come to decision, I've done a tremendous amount of work to get there.

And I always operate under the belief that I'm the least intelligent person in the world.

When I speak on a topic, I've already wrestled with it at length.

I doubt someone who thinks they know everything goes through all of that.  (I could be wrong, I often am.)

If you go to the archives and look at 2006, the groundwork for our criticism of Nouri al-Maliki, chief thug and current prime minister of Iraq, is being laid.

The blast walls, Bremer walls, prison walls, whatever you want to call them?

He'd been in office for a bit and he was out of the country at the time.

The US began putting up those walls throughout Iraq, walling off the city, much to the dismay of the residents of Baghdad.

And Nouri held a press conference to announce that he was removing those walls as soon as he returned.

He returned and the walls remained.

Nouri is a man of broken promises.

I did not come to that opinion in one day or one week or one year.

It's my opinion and I could be wrong.

But my opinion of Nouri, formed over the last eight years, eight years of daily following Iraq, is not a snap judgment and I think people who think they know it all would make very quick judgments.

Also, for the record, some people do know pretty much everything.  They shouldn't feel bad about that -- they either just naturally retain or process (or both)  more knowledge than most of us do.

A friend at the Pentagon called Friday night.  Why wasn't I noting ___?

I didn't know _____.

I don't know everything.  The number of dead -- US military personnel in Iraq -- since the start of the Iraq War increased by four.  (8-10 note: Four, not three.  I need to learn to count.  Entry corrected and my apologies.)



How?

I have no idea.  Here's the screensnap.





Now the Pentagon had noted that there were some service members who were injured and would die of their wounds.  At least one did after the drawdown -- he was injured prior to the drawdown (by several years) and he passed away after the drawdown from those injuries.  So the number hasn't remained static since December 2011.

But these four?

I have no idea.

They might be deaths from injuries before the drawdown, they may not.

This week, our big push was for a dialogue about what could happen -- which did.  Barack's ordered air strikes.  That happened.

The conversation?

We did our part to start it.

Didn't see a lot of others trying.

But, hey, if the left couldn't blog about gardening tips and how awful the GOP is, what would they do all week?  Go back to cat blogging?


Back to the e-mail, when you have to put up new content daily, you do have to have 'opinions' and if you check the early days in the archives, I regularly noted that many wanted me sounding off more.  But if I've achieved the level where I sound like a know it all?

What an amazing actress I must be!







It's over, I'm done writing songs about love
There's a war going on
So I'm holding my gun with a strap and a glove
And I'm writing a song about war
And it goes
Na na na na na na na
I hate the war
Na na na na na na na
I hate the war
Na na na na na na na
I hate the war
Oh oh oh oh
-- "I Hate The War" (written by Greg Goldberg, on The Ballet's Mattachine!)


The number of US service members the Dept of Defense states died in the Iraq War is [PDF format warning] 4491.



The e-mail address for this site is common_ills@yahoo.com.


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i hate the war
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