Short Critical Summary

Some of the main themes in my blog are "the plans for the future in Iraq" and the "the difficulty of life in Iraq for civilians today." There are about nine articles that deal directly with the plans for Iraqi futures, and a few others dealing with combat that mention their future plans; and there are ten articles dealing with Iraqi quality of life.

Over the course of the semester, my "future" articles went from "when are we going to remove the troops" and "how are we going to fix the culture problems there" to "how much money should we send over to help pull out troops" and "we should have them out by 2008!" The quality of life articles did not get any better or worse generally, but they would vary almost weekly stating that "children were playing" and "2 children killed in roadside bombs."

In the future, based on the articles i read recently, i can hypothesize, based on the fact that there is so much back and forth discussion about the issue, that we will not be out by 2008, but probably some time near then. The recent articles about the life in Iraq suggest that there is a lot of inter-cultural unrest, but that people are trying to continue life as best as they can. In the near future, I can guess that there will be a lot more "time limit" deliberating in Congress, but that we will soon come up with a decently efficient plan for our future in Iraq. I cannot say what the future may hold for the Iraqi people, but i will say based on the articles that things will stay bad if not get worse before they get better. It is good that they are trying to generally keep good spirits.

By doing this project, i learned a lot more about the war that i would not have learned without the necessary research. I did not know anything about the specifics, really, at the beginning of the year, but have increased my knowledge about the intricacies of war that I will keep in mind when hearing about it in the future. I was very pleased with the commenting process, and think that reading other people's blogs was a VERY informative thing to do. I would read them without commenting all the time, just so I could know what other people were talking about, and was very interested (especially by the person in my group that was talking about the environment) in learning what they knew as well. I learned, for example, that the power researchers are trying to form a type of energy from algae! I am going to read more about this this weekend when I have free time to, because reading this blog (http://torncountry.blogspot.com/) was the first time I had heard about this, and I find their efforts thought-provoking. I only recieved one comment, but it was extremely insightful and posed interesting questions for me to think about.