The Iron Yuppie

Last week's episode of Six Feet Under was absolutely brutal... check out the summary here and, of course, with added snark here.

Couple of things about the episode that are just priceless. First is the title... I love it when a writer packs in every available nook with meaning... in this case "Ecotone" wonderfully describes the entire episode. To quote Nate: "It's an area where two ecological worlds overlap. You know, like wilderness and civilization." except here it's Nate's wilderness, and everyone else's civilization. Just beautiful.

Second is the fight between Claire and her date. Nicely, neither was portrayed as infinitely knowledgable and certainly both arguments had their flaws. But the thing that resonated with me was how passionately both people seemed to be talking past each other. It wasn't even really ideological... they both basically had their positions and were just reciting. I find myself identifying with one quick exchange which I think rolls up my biggest problems with the war. I'll paraphrase:

Republican Guy: "Bringing democracy to Iraq freed these people from a brutal dictator"
Democratic Girl: "That wasn't the point of the war."

Both are right. The fact is that IF the purpose was to free the Iraqis from a brutal dictator, there could be a thousand ways to do it. Invasion simply does not seem to be the most efficient way to do it. You could massively fund opposition parties... you could get the CIA in there and incite some riots... you could assassinate him! There are a million ways to go about removing a bad person from power and invasion is not optimized for accomplishing that goal in the shortest amount of time with the lowest cost and the highest rate of local support. Invasion is optimized for the goal of removing a threat as quickly as possible, and very little else. Basically, if you defend the policy of going to war in the way that we did you really have two choices... 1) Accept the fact that we did it to remove a threat, first and foremost or 2) Believe that we went in to free the Iraqi people and did it in the worst possible way. Given the state and length of the insurgency, I do not see how there could be any middle ground.

And for those that say that changing governments is hard work and takes a long time, I don't understand why this was so much more complex than Japan after WW II, or the Czech Republic or Russia, or Kosovo. Substantial changes and no long running insurgency there.