Five years

Yep, it's been five years since the excellent adventure in Iraq began. Time flies, don't it.

To mark the day, Feckless Leader gave one of his usual blathering speeches: success, worth it, but it's fragile, blah, blah, blah.

They pretty much don't try anymore, why bother, no one listens anyway. $12B a month to preside over slaughterhouse seems a curious definition of success, and nothing seems fragile about it, it's good for the long haul as long as the money holds out.

We can look towards a future with three basic forks in the road:

• Status quo - the most likely for the next year and beyond. It's got all logic against it, it's utterly hopeless but inaction has really been, apart from Iraq, the most dominant characteristic of the administration.
• Expansion - Iran, Syria, etc. There's no money, no army, no allies, but plenty of bombs just aching to go boom. This would end any hope of returning the US to its good old plutocratic ways, the present kleptocracy would need to morph into more sinister forms of personal rule.
• Rollback - most likely only if there is a significant domestic meltdown. Likewise, probably the end of the plutocracy. If Obama can really change our current political paralysis, engineering a rollback from Iraq would, by itself, put him in the ranks of the great statesmen of all time. Dream on.
  

I'd be tickled pink if I thought that there was any hope in the current election extravaganza. I don't. Mechanisms are now in place (they have been for a while) that ensure America's subservience to a small minority who, with the loss of manufacturing, really have no need for the vast majority of the population. Economic breakdowns, environmental collapse, and political impotence will put the mechanisms into action, probably this decade, surely the next.

Cheers!