by James Glaser
February 2, 2005

This Iraqi election last Sunday had some interesting things about it that no one could call democratic. It was forced on the Iraqi people that every third candidate must be female and that at least 25% of the winners must be women.

I find nothing wrong with this arrangement, other than it was forced on the Iraqi people and could hardly be called fair, but with 55% of Iraq's population female, it seems like a good idea that we did this.

What I find so interesting about this, is right here in the United States we do nothing to insure that women can serve in our government. In our House of Representatives, out of a total of 435 members, 61 are women, 43 are Democrat and 18 are Republican. It would take 109 women getting elected for the United States to have the same amount of female representation in the House as we are making Iraq have. In the US Senate, we have 13 women serving, 10 are Democrats and 3 are Republicans. We would need 12 more women elected to the Senate, for us to have parity with Iraq.

Another thing I find very interesting about our government's policy for the Middle East, is that we are willing to do anything, kill anybody, and have over 12,000 American troops killed and wounded because we are so worried about potential nuclear weapons in that region.

We went to war in Iraq because of that fear and now we are looking real hard at Iran, but we were wrong about Iraq having atomic bombs and we don't really know if Iran does either. However we know for a fact that Israel has nuclear bombs and I guess that is OK with us, or we are afraid to say anything.

We might just be afraid of Israel. It is a fact the Israel attacked the USS Liberty and that their torpedo boats came within 50 feet of the American ship, but claim they couldn't see our flag. They killed 34 American sailors and wounded 172 of them. Washington knows that Israel will fire nukes at us if we push them too hard, so we back off and go after Muslim countries who we can bully.

Another thing I always wonder about, is the fact we know people from Saudi Arabia were the ones who put up the money for the 9/11 terrorist attack, but we do nothing about that either. Again we go after pitiful countries like Iraq and Afghanistan for our revenge. I don't know, but it would seem prudent to me to cut off the money supply going to the terrorists.

You know as far as our attack on Iraq goes, I still don't understand what gave us the right to attack. We know Iraq never attacked us and so the United States has now become the aggressor. Something we have never done, well never done out in the open like this. Always before we had some excuse, like the lie about our ships in the Gulf of Tonkin being attacked so we could escalate and have a real war in Vietnam. I know it is foolish of me to think this, but if we have decided to put on the Black Hat and become the Bad Guys, shouldn't we have had some sort of national debate about that? Now the world over we are looked at as the bullies and as bad people. George Bush made us that way. It wasn't that long ago, less than 5 years and the United States was looked at as the Good Guys.

I also wonder why, if we have an "all volunteer military," why we have to pay $15,000 signing bonuses. Now Washington is feeling guilty, so they want to pay out a hundred grand to any family that lost a loved one. Strange how guilt works. Congress voted to send these men and women to their deaths and now they know it was all for a lie, so they are going to kick in some cash to make everything better.