Iraq, Iran, Iran, Iraq . . .

Too bad we can't call the whole thing off.

After the Iraq War ended, the violence in Iraq did not end, because Shi'ite Prime Minster Nouri al-Maliki didn't share power with the Sunnis like he promised.  Now a small rebel terror army that is so dangerous even al-Qaeda doesn't want to be associated with it has taken over a good chunk of the country with little resistance from the predominately Shi'ite Iraqi army (explaining why 30,000 soldiers ran at the sight of eight hundred jihadis) it's closing in on Baghdad, and President Obama is being blamed for a withdrawal he didn't agree to (George Walker Bush and Maliki signed the deal for a U.S. withdrawal in December 2008) that ended a war he didn't start (Bush and Dick Cheney started it) by a political party interested in the oil reserves of a region they didn't study in high school. 

The Republicans are likely to score political points on this mess, if only because Obama happens to be the Commander-in-Chief, and now Obama has to figure out how to keep the Sunni insurgents from taking over Baghdad . . . and he has to reach out for help to mollify the region to . . . Iran.  Iran?  We're actually going to work with a country whose official policy has been to wish us dead for the past 35 years?  Boy, Alan Jackson is really going to be confused now.

But then, a President who grew up in Indonesia and traveled to Kenya and Germany before he made it to the White House and so knows a little more about the world - including the Middle East  - than his detractors is probably going to appreciate the value of working with the Iranians and understanding the balance of power necessary to stabilize Iraq.  That said, he does not have any good options - breaking up Iraq, a nation invented after World War I, into separate countries just as Yugoslavia (another country invented after World War I), broke up, as Vice President Biden once suggested, is off the table for now - and so Obama's sent three hundred U.S. soldiers to protect the U.S. Embassy and Americans living and working in Iraq.  This could be the slippery slope to Iraq War II for this country, forcing us once and for all to clean up a mess the rest of the planet is still angry at us for making.  

George Walker Bush - who should stop owing Obama his silence and come forward to admit Iraq was all his fault - may have started the war in Iraq for the oil, but, because he only knew about fuzzy ideals as "liberty" and "freedom," he also thought he could build a Western-style democracy in Iraq.  Hey, it worked in Germany after World War II , right?  Yes, but there's a reason a Western-style democracy worked in Germany (and probably works better than ours does these days) - it's a Western country.  The Germans also had an experiment with democracy in the 1920s and so had a pretty good idea of what worked and what didn't when they tried it again after World War II.  Also, the Germans purged a lot of their Catholic-Protestant animosities after going through Martin Luther and the Reformation and all that, which is why you didn't hear about internecine Christian violence in West Germany in the 1950s.   But you see, Bush didn't get any of that, because, like most Americans, he can't understand the world from a point of view other than a provincial one.  He didn't understand centuries of sectarian violence and authoritarianism among Middle Eastern Muslims any more than Reagan understood Russian isolationism.  Even our most intellectually gifted President, Woodrow Wilson, revealed an ignorance of the remnants of Spanish and Portuguese colonial administration in the Latin American republics when he vowed to teach those countries "to elect good men."

Americans are simply ignorant when it comes to the rest of the world.  Jesus Christ and General Jackson, we only discovered World Cup soccer in 1990!  Exactly how ignorant are Americans of world history?  Well, if it weren't for that Abba song, we Americans might never have heard of the Battle of Waterloo!

Which Michele Bachmann probably thinks happened in Iowa.