Americans Proud To Lose Unemployment Benefits, Iraqis Fearful We Don't Love Them Anymore

Julia Ioffe

"My goal is to see how everything works here. This is not a tour." - Dmitry Medvedev

No end in sight for our domestic woes. Congress couldn't pass the current budget package that has been stuck in the Senate for months, resulting in 1.2 million people having their unemployment insurance ended. Main's Senator Olympia Snow seemed to be the only Senator concerned and wrote to Harry Reid to quickly come up with a stand-alone extension bill that could be voted on by itself: "Snowe argues that Senate Republicans and Democrats were able to approve "doc fix" legislation to delaying a scheduled cut in physician Medicare payment after that measure was stripped from the package. The doc fix was approved by unanimous consent in the Senate and also sailed through the House on Thursday.


Snowe suggests the same success could occur for extending unemployment if Reid moves the measure separately." Of course, Olympia has voted against the whole package, as have the rest of the Republicans. And there is no reason why she herself can't craft the needed legislation over the weekend, though it would have more clout coming from the Senate Majority Leader. I don't know what will happen if this doesn't happen, and even more people end up without any means of support for their children. The state won't help, nor the local cities and churches, so where to turn? Will there be a spike in violent robberies, or will the anger and frustration turn the other way, and we see a rise of suicides. It's bad enough that there is a spike in suicides among our returning veterans. Maybe one provision we should make for anyone getting elected to public office is that they must spend at least one month every year working at a homeless shelter or soup kitchen. Could we ever wrestle some compassion and humility from Orrin Hatch or Steve King? I'd include Louis Gohmert, but the guy is just too nuts, speaking his bizarre little speeches to an empty chamber...

While Congress lacks compassion for its own citizens, it seems to have no problem zinging it to some other country by passing approval of the latest set of Iranian sanctions: "Those firms that supply Iran's Revolutionary Guards or contribute to the country's energy industry are targeted by the bill. The sanctions are designed to put pressure on Tehran which denies seeking to acquire nuclear weapons. The bill now goes back to President Barack Obama to be signed into law.
The Senate and House of Representatives acted in quick succession on Thursday to agree to the new penalties. The Senate vote was 99-0 and the House vote was 408-8." Of course, all the Iranian leaders have to do is stop pretending that they are mini-Saddams and prove to the world that they are not interested in making weapons of mass destruction. right now, nobody believes them, and the only street credibility that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has is with uneducated Muslims that still believe the US-is-the-Great-Satan-crap, and is the reason they are living crappy lives with no hope for the future. Hmmm, maybe we will soon have 1.2 million Americans joining them...

Complaints out of Iraq that the shift in policy towards Afghanistan means neglect for poor, poor Iraq. They miss the attentions of General Petraeus, feet that billions more in bribes and aid should still come their way, even if they can't get it together enough to form a government. People are still bombing each other, and now the bombs are directed at robbing banks. Cut the religious pretext, the criminal class is also raiding every tomb they can find, ready to sell the artifacts on ebay or to the departing American generals who are up to their necks in black marketeering.

We never rebuilt Iraq's infrastructure like we said we would, and maybe 1% of all civilian aid actually has financed what projects were started or completed. The rest was all pocketed, with today's result that Bagdad receives less than 4 hours of electricity per day, causing people to riot and demonstrate lately. Plus, the political class is getting nervous and fearful that the US really is going to make them stand up and govern their own country, while US officials have become lazy, counting the days until they can go back home.

"Personally, I think [the military] is adrift," the officer said. "Everyone is spending more time drawing down rather than executing policy…. People aren't thinking about new programs, policies or a legacy." Embassy officials were not reaching out to Iraqi leaders the way they once did, he said.

Who knows, maybe Iraq isn't as dysfunctional as it appears to be, that they are appearing so as a kindness to us, so we can keep on patting ourselves on the back and telling each other how much we helped, no, saved that country... Then, once we leave, they stop bombing the crap out of each other, and kidnapping each other, and raping their cultural heritage. Or, once we leave, they no longer have a central source of support, and things fall apart, they drift back into tribal governance with a new class of warlords, and become the newly annexed state of Iran, who is patiently waiting and thanking the Great Satan for falling for their strategy and doing all of the hard work for them. Sure beats going to war...

Time for Obama to get back and focusing again on foreign policy. I had forgotten that in the days before 9/11 Iran had proposed to the US that they could be allies in fighting against al Qaeda? They too, had deemed them to be dangerous. We preferred to think of Iran as an enemy back then, and then 9/11 happened, changing the political landscape beyond recognition. So, Iran dealt with al Qaeda by keeping bin Laden's family as hostages, and maybe even currently hosting bin Laden as a guest. Sure beats going to war...