Iraq the Vote!

I've met lots of folks, been here for their entire tour, and then watched them leave. It gets old after a while. You stop making friends with people until they've been here awhile or until someone else introduces you to them. Why invest the energy in someone who's going to be gone in sixty days. Not even worth the time to learn your name. That's the feeling. It creeps over you, and then it becomes part of you and the way you deal with people, which makes people think you're a standoffish jerk. And maybe you are. But you don't care what they think anyways cause they're gone in sixty days and screw them. They'll go home to claim how tough it was "Out in Iraq" and probably never speak one word to an Iraqi their entire time here.

We had an election here. It was close, but the current PM is almost certainly out. Government here uses the parlimentary system, and so the current PM's party, although they lost the majority, is probably going to partner with another party of hard core religious Shia to make a majority in order to keep the secular, tolerant candidates at bay. Yeah, cause that's the path to peace and stability and prospertiy right there. Let's sideline the middle of the road people and act like intolerant violent dicks to people who have rockets, mortars and suicide bombs and no jobs or hope and nothign to live for!! That is so totally going to work out better this time than it did in 2005!

It looks like we might be about to end up with a Shia religious dominated government, with the pretty much guaranteed sectarian war breaking out again. So, the body count will go through the roof, we'll take lots of mortar and rockets from both sides, and a lot of the paper pushing namby-pambys who have nothing better to do then put up speed signs and act like fifty year old frat boys will run right the hell out of here. Of course, the "Danger-Lite" crowd which includes most of the attractive women, will also beat feet.

Weirdly enough, I sometimes almost welcome it. Not the death or mayhem, or what it's going to do to the conutry. I don't welcome that at all. But I would welcome back the sense of shared purpose that used to exist here. Everybody had it tough. Everybody had to cope, and we didn't have EEO counselors coming to tell us all to try to speak using gender neutral language (whatever the hell THAT is). We were on the same team and you didn't sweat the small stuff.

It'd be nice to get back to that sense of shared hardship/danger/whathaveyou. So people can get focus on what's important, and what isn't.

-B-