Muddle East

What if the held a Senate Subcommittee and nobody came? They'll be showing up for the Benghazi panel, that much is certain. John Boehner, who is not the guy who played Sergeant Schutz, will make certain of that. He's assembled a crack team of investigators and litigators who just happen to be Republicans.  They want the truth. I just hope we can handle the truth.
Like the truth behind our invasion of Iraq. Why were we there? We were looking for terrorists, right? Or was it the Weapons of Mass Destruction? Perhaps it was the oil? Well, as it turned out, we didn't get any terrorists, WMD, or oil out of the deal. What we lost, was a little more plain: more than four thousand American soldiers. That doesn't include the two thousand plus casualties in Afghanistan. That's where we were really hunting terrorists. The real bad guys and their leader. Not Saddam Hussein, but the real bad guy, Osama bin Laden. Who just happened to be hanging out in Pakistan, a country in the region we hadn't made arrangements to invade. We were far too busy poking around in all those other despot-ridden countries to notice.
Now we're trying to figure out how to deal with the mess that we made by going over there in the first place. Where did all those records about claims and benefits for the veterans of those foreign wars go, for example? We don't apparently need the oil so much, and now that the bad guys are dead, we have to figure out a new reason to keep our noses in there just in case we need the oil after all.
We, or the United States, have embassies that keep opening and closing all the time over there in the Middle East. Like the time that bad guys took over our embassy in Iran and held the diplomatic personnel there long enough to give Ted Koppel his own show until Ben Affleck went over there to rescue them. Or something like that. But ever since then, we've been opening and closing our embassies as a precaution, just in case something bad like that might happen again and Ben was busy being Batman or counting cards at the Hard Rock Casino. One of those was probably the case when bad guys overran the embassy in Benghazi.
It's not funny that people died. Four or four thousand, but now, shortly before the next flurry of elections we will hold to try and figure out who will eventually become members of a subcommittee that will look into how we handled or mishandled our latest misstep in the Middle East. It's not funny "ha ha." It's funny "historical irony." Or something like that.