Working on the shameless principal that any picture of Angelina Jolie will automatically generate interest (well that’s one word for what it generates) here is proof that even if she is as weird to me as she is beautiful she is someone worth listening to.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/27/AR2008022702217.html
The fight in Iraq and Afghanistan I believe is noble and I think there is a pretty good chance that President Bush - warts and all - will be judged to have been right to have taken the fight to Islamic Fascism. What we should pray for now is a continued sense of purpose in order that nation building can begin. That’s basically the point that Ms. Jolie makes. After all this blood and treasure pulling out now would be a disaster when victory (in the sense of a real functioning country) is perhaps just around the corner.
John McCain suggested that we may be in Iraq for 100 years. He was talking of course about our presence in places like Japan, Germany and the Philippines where the United States served as a security bulwark in very dangerous times. But let me make a different point. I lived in Dubai which the Brits helped administer as a “protectorate” for I think about 150 years. When the Brits left in the early seventies there was one road and no system of running water in the country. Less than 40 years later Dubai might not be perfect but it certainly has made dramatic advances inculding currently building the world’s tallest building.
I posted about Barrack Obama a few days ago saying how much I felt “hope” resonated with all of us because of the fragment of our created perfection that lives within us. What Angelina Jolie seems to have is a practical sense of this being the moment when we can turn our hopes for a better Iraq into reality. And Dubai shows that it doesn’t need centuries to make enormous differences.