Obama, apologize?
For what? Telling the truth? Excuse me, maybe he should apologize for understating the enormity of the waste? 3000 American lives if you are counting only the dead. But what of the wounded? What of those lives in New Orleans which can’t be rebuilt because the funds and the National Guard are in a foreign land? What of the 600,000 Iraqi lives? Obama should not apologize, 3000 lives is only the beginning of the waste.
I value the lives of our Solders. I value the commitment and the sacrifice they and their families have made in honor of the grand idea that is America. I despise those who would trade that honor to profit themselves. There was never a reason to invade Iraq. There was NEVER a reason. Those who support this war should be ashamed of themselves for putting false idols before the lives of real men.
That said. We have a real mission in Iraq now. We have to clean up and we have to nation build. I couldn’t disagree with Obama more on this point. Timelines are foolish, what we need is concrete objectives. real objectives, that can be measured, and real plans to acheive those objectives. The basic stuff, hospitals, common currency, working schools systems, electricity, roads, working police and military and bombs not going off every day. This must be our first priority. We have become weak and unable to stomach what is required to finish what we must do in Iraq. You can not give democracy to a people. They must take it. In the mean time we can provide them some level of stability.
What we have been doing in that country to date has not been helping to rebuild it, but helping to Capitalize it. This administration has sought to turn all public works into private corporations. As though the people of Iraq and our Soldiers are laboratory mice with which to test their economic theory. Those are lives wasted. This new form of Manifest Destiny is wasting the lives of our soldiers, it is wasting the future of our children, it is wasting the resources of our present.