War In A Rack

I want to talk a little bit today about the War in Iraq. I want to begin by saying that I've always been against this war. At the time that we went into Iraq I felt that it was a mistake and I still believe that today. However, I don't believe, as the Democratic Presidential candidates do, that we should simply pull all of our soldiers out of Iraq and leave as quickly as possible. That would probably be as big of a mistake as the original invasion was.

When we first decided to invade Iraq, the biggest justification given was that they had Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). That was later proven to be wrong and I believe that it was a product of bad, possibly even falsified, intelligence. The idea was that Iraq had WMD, and the would use those against us if we didn't disarm them. To begin with, even if Iraq did have WMD, I don't think Saddam Hussein was crazy enough or dumb enough to use them against the most powerful country in the world. Saddam was not an idealogue, or a religious zealot, as the leaders of Al Quaeda who carried out the September 11th attacks were. Saddam cared about one thing only, power and he knew that attacked United States was not going to bring him more power. If he did claim to have WMD, it was probably to keep the other country's in the region, like Iran, from attacking HIM. He had enough problems without provoking us.

Another argument that has been used is that Saddam was a brutal dictator and we needed to depose him for humanitarian reasons. It's true, Saddam was a brutal dictator, but he was also holding together a country that was ripe for civil war. Iraq was drawn on a map with no eye to the various ethnic groups living in the region. The sunnis, shi-ites and kurds in Iraq hate each other much more than they hate us. Saddam, for everything that was wrong with him, kept that country from devolving into civil war, which it has done since we invaded and took him out. Now, our soldiers are dying and they try to act as police to keep Iraqis from killing each other. Saddam Hussein was too busy trying to keep his country together and keep other countries in the region at bay, he didn't have time to interest himself with attacking America.

I also don't believe that the humanitarian argument is a valid one. We have plenty of problems here at home; poverty, inner city drug and gang violence, 40 million Americans without health insurance, etc. When all of our problems here at home are solved, then we can go out and try to solve the world's problems. Until then though, we should be spending our money trying to solve the problems in our country. Furthermore, the Bush Administration will probably tell you that they thought that we could establish a democracy in Iraq, which would give democracy and freedom a foothold in the region. In a word, this is ludicrous. Democracy and freedom are not something that can be forced on people. I think that they have to happen on their own, or they simply won't work. The bottom line is that our government of the people, for the people and by the people, in this country, would not work without a respect for the rule of law. Our country works on ideas and not by force If a country or a people are too used to living under the iron-fist of dictatorship and force, they're simply not going to be able to make a quick and easy transition to following democracy and the rule of law.

So, instead of stabilizing the region and creating a foothold for democracy in the Middle East, we've created a hotbed of instability and hatred for America. The Muslims in the Middle East don't hate us for our freedom, they hate us because we're not Muslim and we don't have the proper respect (in their opinion) for the Muslim holy places. That wasn't a problem in Iraq, because it was a secular country run by a secular dictator. Now it is a problem, because we have to sects of Muslims fighting each other over there and the Kurds in Northern Iraq thrown in. We have a bloody civil war, that we have to try to police. We have major instability in a region that is vital to our national interests because of our dependence on oil.

To being with, we need to end our dependence on foreign oil. If we can do that, we can leave the people in the Middle East to fight among themselves over the minute differences in their religious beliefs. But, until then stability in the region is important to us. If we simply back out of Iraq and leave, there will be a bloody civil war in Iraq and further instability in the region. In addition, we'll be putting our tail between our legs like a whipped dog and showing the rest of the world that America can be defeated. Other countries and terrorist groups, especially radical Islamists, will no longer fear us. They will feel free to attack us in whatever manner they wish and American soil will be in more danger than it has ever been in our history.

Sadly, we're mired in a very bad situation and I blame President Bush and his Administration for getting us into a mess that they had no idea how to get out of. Unfortunately, now that we're in this mess, we have to stay until we can find a good way out, and simply withdrawing the troops as quickly as possible is not the right plan.