Accessing Iraq

In a little over a month, the United States is supposed to hand over control of Iraq to the Iraqi people. Bush stubbornly keeps repeating that he has no intentions of changing these plans, but looking at the situation, I wonder just how he or anyone else expects this to happen. No, I don’t think we should keep ruling Iraq like imperialist conquerors, but after the mess we’ve created I don’t think we can just bow out either. Just yesterday the leader of the Iraqi governing council was killed by a car bomb. Who exactly do we plan to give power to, and do we really think they can lead a deeply divided and destroyed country?

This war was a huge mistake. I said that to begin with, and I stand by that now. In my opinion, it has done more damage to America than it has healed. Our reasons for going to Iraq were sketchy at best. The rest of the world saw that. They asked for convincing proof that Iraq was doing the things we accused it of – creating WMDs and training terrorists – and when we failed to provide it, they asked us to wait and consider other options. The world wasn’t disagreeing that Saddam was a horrible tyrant who everyone would be better without. The world was asking us to consider if uncompromising military action was the best way to create world peace. Of course, it wasn’t, but being blinded by hatred and revenge we failed to see that. Now, not only have we alienated those who were once our allies, we have bred extreme hatred for us among a huge percentage of the world’s population. We weren’t just fighting Saddam. We weren’t just fighting Iraq. We are fighting the world’s largest religion. In many ways, it is our crusade against their jihad. We went to Iraq naively believing that once we got rid of Saddam, the people would see us as liberators and rush to fall down at our feet. That hasn’t happened. Not because all Iraqis, Middle Easterners, or Muslims loved Saddam, but because they are afraid that we are trying to take away their way of life. Many of us hate certain things about our country. Many of us hate George Bush. But if someone attacked our country, we would fight tooth and nail to defend it. We would be fighting for ourselves, our families, our beliefs, and our way of life. This is what these people are doing. To have American soldiers, mainly Christians, telling them what to do and how to live, is a huge affront to these people.

But that’s not it. Us leaving wouldn’t solve the problem either. We’ve created a huge power vacuum in a deeply divided country. We’ve tried to solve this by establishing a constitution and a democratic governing body. The problem, again, is that we, and not they, established it. We cannot enforce democracy. Reference Vietnam and Korea. We can’t really enforce any form of government unless we remain as occupying powers. Reference East Germany and the former Russian bloc countries. What we’ve created is a country that is on the brink of a civil war. We’ve dramatically decreased the living standards of the people. While Sadam may have terrorized the people, he did also provide them with electricity, clean water, health care, and oil. We’ve yet to do any of that. At this point, the people are looking for anyone who can improve their lives at all, and they are dividing into camps of people supporting various people, very few of whom have any real interests beyond their own acquisition of power. While Bush may have declared last May while parading around in a flight suit on board a US destroyer that the fighting in Iraq was over, the truth is that it will last for years and years. No, Iraq is not the new Vietnam. Iraq is the new Afghanistan. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, look up some information on the USSR’s occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. Thanks to September 11, we all know what a great country Afghanistan turned out to be. Scarily enough, Iraq is heading down the same path. Ironically, our war on terrorism has done nothing but breed more. Is the world a safer place now than it was before we invaded Iraq? I say no. Not only have we fueled the passions of thousands if not millions of enemies, we have also alienated our allies. In today’s fragile world, standing alone is not safe.

Do I know what we should do? No, I don’t. I hope someone does though, because we can’t continue down this path. I dread to see where it leads. Iraq is a terrible mess that we got ourselves into. Now we must find a way to get ourselves out of it without messing up the state of the world anymore. Going to Iraq was a mistake. But not our biggest mistake. Our biggest mistake was our failure to establish a plan for what we would do once we overthrew Saddam. Again, our failure was that we were unable to look beyond our own interests to see the rest of the world.