Some Thoughts on Iraq

Some Thoughts on the War in Iraq. Even most conservatives now seem willing to admit that our preemptive war in Iraq was ill-conceived and has been badly carried out by this administration. It’s worth pointing out here that Democrats have been saying that all along and that we are pleased to have those on the right join us. Now the apparent Republican position is that however badly our early invasion was conducted, we are now engaged and must fight to the finish. We must, it is said, keep on until we “succeed”. The trouble with this position is that we are not being told what success will look like when we achieve it. The general claim is that when the Iraqi government is strong enough to defend itself, we can “stand down”. But how strong is strong enough? Republicans won’t answer. How soon will that be? There is no answer to that either. My take on all this is that we’ve never been told the truth about why this president and his neoconservative advisors wanted to achieve regime change in Iraq in the first place. We’ve never been told why we are building the largest and best fortified embassy in the world in Baghdad and a dozen or more permanent (the administration calls them “enduring”) bases throughout Iraq’s oil fields. The answers to such questions, it seems to me, are precisely as Alan Greenspan suggested (after his retirement). This war was, is, and will continue to be about petroleum and American oil company access to it. Put another way, this war is about corporate profit, and we have largely destroyed a country in search thereof. An excellent and authoritative critique can be found at www.multinationalmonitor.org/mm2007/012007/interview-juhasz.html Oh, and lest you think this bit of political discourse is not “local”, check out the price of gas in Erwin these days!

Welcome to my Blog

Welcome to the Democratic entry to “All Politics is Local” blog site. I’m Dave Logan and I’ll be writing in this space for a while. Before we get to the politics of the moment, however, you should know a little something about me. I’ve been an upper east Tennessean since 1979 and have lived in Unicoi County for the past twenty years. I retired from ETSU’s Art Department four years ago after a forty year teaching career. I was raised by people who had suffered considerably through the Great Depression and who therefore thought Franklin D. Roosevelt walked on water. My granddaddy was a union man and believed absolutely that the union allowed him and his to live, and retire, comfortably. So, you bet I’m a Democrat.

As an opening shot for this new venture of mine, I refer you to a statement made yesterday by Mitt Romney as he “suspended” his campaign for the Republican nomination. He repeated a phrase that is part of Republican theology; he said that one key to future prosperity is to end restrictive regulation on business and industry.

Now we have been, during the last few Republican administrations, through a rash of business and industry abuses in an unregulated economic climate that should, by now, have brought us to realize that businesses that can do whatever they want, will. And it will not be self-regulatory. We have the savings and loan disaster, Enron, the current mortgage debacle, and much, much more evidence to prove our point.

My question for your consideration is this: do we really want to trust the Ken Lays of this world to manage our economic system with no oversight? Or might it be better if we the people exercised that oversight through our elected representatives in Congress and the Legislature? Future prosperity for whom, we might ask? What say you?

Was it a super-sized event?

Nationwide, Democrats have been coming out in force during this primary election season. It was interesting to see that Democrats seemed to be following that same trend in Unicoi County.

In early voting alone this year, nearly three times as many Democrats cast ballots as they did in 2004. According to the Unicoi County Election Commisson, Democrats accounted for only 132 votes cast in early voting, compared to this year when 362 citizens opted to participate in the Democratic primary.

As for Republicans, there was a decrease from those taking advantage of early voting four years ago. In 2004, 998 Republicans cast ballots in early voting compared to only 889 in 2008.

I love disecting politics, so I wondered if Unicoi County was following a nation trend in getting Democrats to the polls or if it’s just because Tennessee had moved up its primary to be with the other 24 states participating in “Super Tuesday.” But it doesn’t seem to be a super-size issue.

In 2004, Tennessee’s primary election was the second week in February instead of the first week, as in 2008.

Also four years ago, there was a “mini-Super Tuesday” the week before the Tennessee election, and “Super Tuesday” wasn’t even until March, so it’s not like the election was decided before Tennesseans went to cast ballots and, thus, making people not interested in voting.

So why did more Democrats vote in 2008 in Unicoi County than in 2004? I guess it’s what folks are seeing all over the country — that is, people seem to be very engaged in the candidacies of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Certainly Clinton and Obama seem far more interesting and engaging than John Kerry, the eventual nominee for the Democrats in 2004.