ANDY ROONEY AND IRAQ

(sigh)

There are tons of people smarter than I in the world, but I sometimes wonder if they see the lint when they contemplate their navels.

I listened to Andy Rooney talk about Iraq on "60 Minutes" the other night and couldn't help but wonder if his eyebrows have wormed their way into his brain through his ears and short circuited his thinking. The bottom line to his recent commentary is that while we did the right thing in getting rid of Saddam that we are now in a war that is wrong...that Bush should address the people of this country and tell them that he thought we were doing the right thing by going into Iraq but that he made a mistake and that we should now pull out.

This isn't going to happen, and it shouldn't. We can't leave the people of Iraq in the throes of civil war, created (much to my chagrin) by our actions over there. We need to finish what we went there to do.

But
this
isn't
going
to
happen
either.

I don't think we'll be able to win this war because the religious hostilities bear such a close resemblance to the Palestinian/Israeli conflict of decades. It's not about oil, it's about religious intolerance. Add the terrorist element into the mix, with their own religious agenda, and what stacks up is a situation not resolvable. I feel sorry for President Bush. And what I'd like to ask him is why we just didn't arrange for Saddam to meet with an "accident" and then sit back and let the Iraqis try to right themselves once he was gone. We could have watched from the sidelines and hoped for the best.

(sigh)