Iraq
The Democrats are wrong. Yup, you heard me right. The Democrats are barking up the wrong tree on this one. Simply pulling troops out of Iraq would be a mistake. Dividing up the nation into religious and ethnic regions would be a mistake. Pandering to the stupidity of the American People instead of leading them down the right road may very well cost this country strategically, and create a new error of violence in the Middle East the likes of which I don’t even want to imagine.
Bush is right. Well kinda. OK Bush is dead wrong about pretty much everything except one thing and he can’t even articulate that right. Failure to stabilize Iraq will result in instability within our own country and cause an explosion in the number of acts of terrorism around the world. We simply cannot let Iraq crumble into Civil War. Pulling out of Iraq is not like pulling out of Vietnam where we were at war with an enemy that played by the rules of traditional warfare.
We never should have gone into Iraq. Our president lied at every turn and the American People blood thirsty for revenge after 9/11 bought those lies without question. Every justification made to support invading Iraq was a lie and it was glaringly obvious. I shouldn’t need to tell you what they are, if you don’t know by now — well that’s pretty sad. We have however broken the beehive and there are a lot of pissed off bees swarming looking for somebody to blame.
The current state of affairs in Iraq should have easily been foreseen. Much of the Islamic world has been kept in poverty by brutal dictators since World War 2, many of them, including Saddam Hussein funded and kept in power by us. People, like rats, kept under a constant state of stress turn on each other. They create factions and those factions compete for what little resources they can scrounge. It’s the same behavior we seen in gangs in our inner cities. Saddam Hussein as horrible as he was, was the cork that kept the Iraq from exploding. Remove the cork and well…
We removed the cork. Not only did we remove the cork, we broke the bottle. When we invaded Iraq we destroyed most of it’s infrastructure. We opened the door to Iran and Syria and invited them to wreak havoc in a country which they’ve long despised and in which they have strong ties to religious sects.
For our Politicians to speak of withdrawal. For both them and the media who echo them, to speak of Iraq as though somehow the Iraqis are responsible for the chaos which has ensued in that country since we invaded it, is disgusting. You don’t take the cork of a shaken bottle of champaign and expect that nobody will be getting wet. Yes it would be best for both Iraq and for the United States if they would stop bombing each other. It would have been best if we had never gone in in the first place.
So what to do now that we are there? The truth is I don’t know. What I do know is that if I came into your house with a sledge hammer and took to smashing anything I could see, it would be my responsibility to repair your house. Also I think you might not want me in your house to repair it. Perhaps as such, given that 60-70 percent of Iraqis think we should leave, it might not be a bad idea for use to hire a repairman. Perhaps we could talk the U.N. into committing peace keeping troops to Iraqi if we funded them a 100 billion or so and a committed a lot of troops ( under their authority ).
Short of that we’ll need to be there alone for at least another 6-10 years. Which is what we should have planned on to begin with. Damn foolish that we didn’t. I don’t hate to say… I told you so.