By Dillon Piekarsky
Senior Copy Editor
There are those with loaded guns, and there are those who dig. You can’t change it, so you might as well learn to accept it. The U.S. is going to bomb Iraq. We should just get it over with. There’s no reason to drag our feet on this. The United States will bomb Iraq again, and we the people will continue to bomb it in eternal recurrence. As long as the sun hangs over the Iraqi sky, the United States of America and its people will be there to bomb everything underneath it.
And as our technology advances, so too will our ability to bomb the cradle of civilization. Maybe I’m being cynical. It might not always be that way. Maybe we’ll perfect a loworbit space laser that makes the bombing of Iraq no longer mechanically necessary. Maybe that day will be the day when the United States bombs Iraq for the last time, and instead becomes a more enlightened society that space cannons it instead.
The past four presidents have bombed Iraq, so they’ve been bombing Iraq my entire life. If you’re a younger student like me, they’ve been bombing Iraq all of your life, too. Obama will bomb Iraq. Obama will bomb Iraq. Obama will bomb Iraq.
I’m sure there’s some beautiful argument to be made about the necessity of bombing Iraq to stop evil, and there’s an equally beautiful argument to be made that bombing Iraq is a terrible mistake that will entangle us even more. Maybe we’re bombing them for some unspoken shady political reason and they just happen to be evil, too. Bombing evildoers seems reasonable in the case of a captured Islamic State militant who, according to the Telegraph, claimed to have beheaded a baby.
Maybe when we’re done bombing Islamic State, we can bomb a few Mexican drug cartels for the sake of a little moral consistency. For that to happen, we’d have to be done bombing Iraq, and at this point we all know that as long as there’s an Iraq around to bomb, it will be bombed, and we The United States of America will likely be the ones bombing it.
Do you think the next president won’t bomb Iraq? 2016 is a long way away, but Hilary Clinton is probably going to be the next president. Clinton has gone on record to say that Islamic State is a result of failure to intervene in Syria. She’s much more warlike than Obama, and we live in a world where the Republicans can’t and won’t put up an electable candidate. Even if they could, he or she would probably also be in favor of bombing Iraq. They would probably bomb Iraq harder.
In 2008, obnoxious conservative bullhorn and political troll Ann Coulter said she’d campaign for Clinton over the at-the-time GOP frontrunner John McCain, according to a 2008 CNN article. Why? McCain was softer on terrorism than Clinton. Reminder: McCain was the one who said we’d stay in Iraq for over 100 years if we had to.
People complain about there not being much difference between the two parties, but in this case, I can really appreciate the lack of nuance. It’s less of a moral conundrum if you know both the blue team and the red team are going to bomb Iraq. I feel my responsibility entirely absolved.
As a matter of fact, I hate Islamic State. I really, really hate Islamic State. Just the thought of seeing those fanatic idiots getting blown up on grainy AC130 kill-feeds makes me feel kind of giddy. There’s a little part of me that feels bad for celebrating the destruction of human life, but he’s smothered by the memory of that Islamic State militant who bragged about beheading a baby. You should really, really hate the Islamic State, too. It’ll make it easier on you when we do bomb them and the various countries they inhabit. And the splinter group that crawls from the wreckage in a decade. And the splinter group that crawls from the wreckage of the splinter group.