Life as always assumes shades of light and shades of darkness.
On the one hand you have what is shaping up to be a great World Cup. The games have been good; there have only been a handful of draws and one of them (Mexico v. Brazil) was a classic example of the rare but extremely entertaining nil-nil draw; I saw the greatest goal I have ever seen, and on top of all that the USA managed to beat Ghana 2-1 in spite of the best efforts of the Devil of Wednesday.
Even the dire predictions on world cup disaster haven't happened. So far all the stadium's are still up, no one's been beheaded, and there is no shortage of speedos or thongs on TV or available for purchase at your local speedo and thong store. Logistical hiccups? Yes. Counterfeit tickets? You betcha. An over zealous Alexi Lalas? Absolutely. But all that seems miles away, and if you turn the sound off when Alexi Lalas is speaking and play instead some Peruvian flute music the effect can be almost delightful.....well, no, it's still pretty awful.
On the other hand, you have ISIS making deep incursions into Iraq, setting up a harsh brand of Sharia law, and maybe tipping Iraq into another sectarian conflict, undoing all the work we did to try to put the country back together again after pretty much blowing it up in the first place. Even if the nation does recover and manages to push ISIS out, they may still end up a more broken nation, more decentralized.
The news media has been arguing about what to do since the offensive began last week and who's fault the deterioration of the situation actually is. Most liberals seem to want to place the blame squarely on Bush's shoulders for having the US invade Iraq in the first place, while most conservatives naturally blame Obama for pulling out troops in 2011.
Is it possible that (gasp!) both are to blame? In my opinion, the invasion of Iraq was probably the worst foreign policy decision this country ever made. We had no grasp of the underlying politics, we had no understanding of the culture. We were naive and stupid and clumsy. At best we allowed ourselves to believe a tenuous connection between Saddam Hussein, WMD's, and terrorism; at worst the American public was deliberately deceived concerning the reasons for going to war.
Once we were there it took us a long time to get it right, to figure out how right a sinking ship. Thanks to new counter-insurgency tactics coalition forces managed to stabilize the country. 4 years after "The Surge" the Obama administration pulled out our troops, and I suppose the question we must ask now is was that enough time? All of the books I have read (okay, fine, the TWO books that I have read and the History Channel) all say that it takes many more years, on the order of 10 or more, to successfully quell a counter-insurgency to the point where the war is over. Was 4 years enough?
Evidently, maybe not.
The other argument in the media is what should we do now? I found myself surprised to be in the McCain camp with his fighting fighty fighters, as my own knee jerk reaction was that airstrikes were probably in order. And despite the fact that we'd be entering a sectarian conflict I still think that air support might be something we should provide. ISIS are bad dudes, so bad that Al Queda doesn't even really want to be associated with them. Having them take over half of Iraq would be devastating and a disaster for the people living there. And perhaps force is the only language the militants really understand.
On the flip side, while I hate the naive pomposity of fellow liberals who are arguing for a political solution to the crisis, I also am wary of the old school conservative's arrogance in believing that American military might can always altar a situation in our favor. A good case in point is with Libya, where western military action aided rebels in overthrowing a dictatorship to be replaced by....well, nothing. The jury is still out on what the consequences of that conflict are.
It would be great if sowing democracy throughout the middle east like a modern day Johnny Appleseed ended up in America's best interests. We seemed to think it would. Plant the seeds of freedom with a few bombs and by the following spring the people will be free, they'll be enjoying their $1 breakfast sandwiches, washing their cars on their lunch breaks, the burqas will be replaced with bikinis, and the Dallas Cowboys would be flying in to play the Baghdad Bulldogs on Thanksgiving Day. And yet here we are now, faced with the prospect of a terrorist organization established in Iraq - ironically the very thing we went to war in the first place ostensibly to avoid.
Arrogance, hubris, call it what you like. We were wrong. And while I feel that maybe our duty to Iraq is to continue to aid them, to try to get them out of this mess we have, in part, created, I have a horrible feeling there is very little we can do about it.
Is the Devil of Wednesday still busy? Maybe he has some good suggestions. Or maybe he could at least cast a spell that will help John McCain calm down a peg.
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