The Third Hundred Years War Has 86 To Go

[The Grand Nudger]

Remember, this is the area where they invented organized warfare. Nothing has changed in all those thousands of years. They don't WANT to stop fight, not until every enemy is dead.

-and also organized society...civilization.

We have broken it and we can't fix it, Khem.  Armies are generally shitty tools to do anything except kill people and break things.  Sadly, our only tool seems to be the army.

Our military is only as good as it's orders.  In any case, the solution to some local peoples immediate problem is to kill someone or break something.  This isn't ideal, but it's a practical reality.  It's a vanishingly small fraction of our armed forces that actually do this killing...and most of them are just as good..if not better, at the sort of manual labor required in disaster relief.  Among that vanishingly small fraction that kills...they spend and even smaller fraction killing.  Mostly, they engage in the sorts of manual labor expected of disaster relief.  This is how we fill the time between shootings.  Mech units go so far as the bring the equipment, you need it to support mech units anyway.

Now, whatever the fuck will we do when the Shi'ite government tries to crush the Kurds?  The Kurds which have been about the only reliable allies we have had?

The right thing, I hope.....but somehow I don't think that we will.

Here's a hint.

Expect the Kurds to tell both us and Baghdad to go fuck ourselves.

Yeah, we told our allies to quiet down and not poke the bear.  I can see why we would do that and why they would go ahead and poke the thing anyway.