There is no question that this war has divided this county and brought into question the integrity of the current administration. Even members of the President's own party have distanced themselves and I don't know of anyone that is 100% in favor of the war. Col. Joseph Collins (Ret) calls it a 'major debacle' and goes on to talk about how it has damaged our standing globally. I think the question in most people's mind is why? Why are we even there? Why are our service men and women putting their lives on the line, and for what? Why are we spending billions on a war when there is so much need at home? After the first Gulf War in 90/91 a lot of people asked why then, why we didn't just take Bagdad? One of the reasons I heard was that if Bagdad had fallen we would then have had to stay indefinitely, we couldn't just topple their government and then leave .... plus that was not the objective. In the words of Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf "My mission, plain and simple, was kick Iraq out of Kuwait. Period. There were never any other orders." So why did we go back? Oh yes, the illusive weapons of mass destruction.
However, Congress voted and five years later we're stuck in an unpopular war and caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place. We'd all like to see our troops home, but how? If we pull out now we leave a country with a flegling government that will no doubt collapse and the people will end up possibly under a worse dictatorship than they had before. Is that what we really want? There is no telling what the people of Iraq would suffer if this were to happen, especially to those who supported us. There are families there, innocent women and children, who want nothing more than to live in peace and enjoy the same freedoms we do. We've given them a taste of that and we owe it to them to see it through, if we have any compassion we can't just heartlessly throw them to the wolves. Most of the "experts" agree that pulling out is not an option despite what political candidates may promise, and that we'll be there a long time. Even if Iraq were able to stand on it's own feet we'd more than likely still keep a base there just like we still have military bases in Germany, Korea and Japan.
But anyway, back to why. Common rhetoric is "Bush lied". Well we didn't find any WMD, but that just doesn't make sense. Why would the President put his credibility on the line? Surely if it was a lie then they would have covered their hineys. According to the conspiricy theorists the government orchestrated 9-11 so it would be real easy to photoshop a few pictures, maybe dig up some "missiles" in the Nevada desert, supply the media with video of chemical/biological agents that had been found .... and instead of deriding the President we would be praising his actions, fat, dumb and happy in our ignorance.
Did we go to war just to take down Saddam Hussein? Well there is no doubt that he was an evil man, he was guilty of genocide and other attrocities and I don't think anyone is sorry he is gone, but we don't tend to go around invading countries just because we don't like their leadership. If we did we could have sorted out Darfur long ago instead of letting the UN prissy foot around.
If this is a war for oil why are we paying $3.40 a gallon? Let's just get it and go.
Then something I read the other day lead me a different theory .... maybe this was Al Qaeda's plan all along. It would have been easy for them to plant information alluding to WMD in Iraq, then riding the tide of the 9-11 attacks they could draw us into a war on their grounds. These are patient people, their plans well thought out, but despite their hatred for us maybe even they understand that as a united nation we cannot be defeated, but divided we can fall. There is no shortage of information on how divided this county was during the Vietnam war and we're not far from that now, there is a lot of hatred and anger surrounding this war, people have lost faith in the government, and while the majority of Americans still support our troops how long before the Cindy Sheehan's of this world turn public opinion against them too. We have become weak and vulnerable and so busy fighting between ourselves that we have lost sight of the very real danger out there .... and that means our enemies have all but won.
For my own personal piece of mind I have to believe that despite the reasons for getting into this mess we are doing good things over there, and our soldiers are not dying in vain. I have to have hope that there is a solution and our troops will come home, and I pray that we can find it soon. I'm sure I'm not alone in wishing we could turn back the hands of time ..... but since that is not possible I still look for reasons and understanding. I came across this article the other day, and while I may not necessarily agree with all of it, it gave me another option to contemplate on why we stay in this war.
Bush screwed the pooch in Iraq. There is a good argument to be made that we should not have invaded in the first place.* There is no good argument that we should leave.
This conclusion is inevitable when one comes to the same realization as me. There was a war in Iraq and there is a war in Iraq. In fact, we've had two wars in Iraq: Iraq War I & Iraq War II.
The war now is not the same as that war. The first war in Iraq was against Saddam Hussein, the second war is against Islamists of various stripes, but mainly al Qaeda.
Many of the arguments used by those who keep reminding us that Bush's decision to invade Iraq was a mistake are valid. While Saddam Hussein strategically supported groups linked to Osama bin Laden, there was not a substantial al Qaeda presence in Iraq prior to the invasion. Ansar al Islam, the main Sunni Islamist group in Iraq prior to the invasion that would eventually morph into al Qaeda in Iraq, operated nearly exclusively in the Kurdish north---a zone not firmly under Hussein's sovereignty.
All would agree that the invasion liberated Iraqis from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein. That was the First Iraq War.** It ended the day Saddam Hussein was captured.
The post-invasion period subjected Iraqis to the tyranny of chaos. The vacuum left by the Baathist police state was filled by yet another tyranny: the tyranny of Sunni Islamists, like al Qaeda; and the tyranny of Shia Islamists, like those following Muqtada al Sadr. This is when the Second Iraq War started.
The first war was against Iraq, a nation-state. The second war is against terrorists and Islamist rebels.
It is true that mistakes made in the first war led to the second war. It may also be true that our national security was not enhanced by that first war.
But the first war is over. We won. Handily. Easily. It's history.
Failing to see the two war distinction is critical. From Obama we hear that he was "against the war" from the beginning. From Clinton we hear that she "changed her mind on the war sometime after she realized that the war was a mistake."
Continuing to allow politicians to criticize the war in Iraq by criticizing the decision to topple the Hussein regime is to allow them to conflate two very separate issues: 1) should we have invaded Iraq? 2) should we now give up fighting al Qaeda and anti-government Islamist elements in Iraq?
Answering no to question number one says nothing about how question two should be answered. Nothing.
The Second Iraq War may have been of our own making, but it is the very war the Democrats say they want to fight: a war against terrorists.
In fact, until recently our greatest enemy in this Second Iraq War has been al Qaeda, the very people that all Americans claim as common enemies.
Failing to see the two war distinction has led to much confusion and obfuscation. The vast majority of criticisms about Bush's handling of post-war Iraq can be equally leveled at Bush's handling of post-war Afghanistan.
In both countries there is a weak central government engaged in a protracted civil war against Islamist rebels with no end in sight. In both countries the removal of U.S., Coalition, and NATO forces would almost certainly lead to a failed state and return to anarchy. In turn this would lead to pockets where Islamist friendly to al Qaeda would give them free reign to open training camps. The exact conditions that existed in Afghanistan just prior to 9/11 and which existed in Iraq from the fall of the Baathist state until last year!
If the results of a U.S. withdrawal would be the same in both Afghanistan and Iraq, then why is there so much focus on removing troops from Iraq and not Afghanistan? Partly it is because we continue to speak of the war in Iraq as a mistake because we should not have invaded in the first place. While we continue to speak of the war in Afghanistan in terms of the decision to invade being correct.
Many in American cannot get over that initial mistake. And because we lack the vocabulary to distinguish between the initial mistake leading to the First Iraq War, we are unable to separate our feelings about it from the Second Iraq War.
After years of support for the war, some in the center and on the right have decided that the initial invasion of Iraq was a mistake. They feel like their initial support was in error or that they were duped. Lacking any other vocabulary, they lash out at the war or at the Bush Administration for starting it.
Because McCain supports the war in Iraq they have no other recourse than to support Obama who was against the war. A vote for McCain is a vote in support of the war, which they now see as a mistake.
What they do not see-- and in fact cannot see, because how can you see what you cannot articulate? -- is that they are voting to end a war that is already over! Simultaneously, a vote for Obama is a vote to end the very war on terror that they claim they fully support!
It may seem hypocritical that one could support the war against terrorists in Afghanistan but not the war against terrorists in Iraq, but it's not. As long as we continue to speak of the war in Iraq a large proportion of people will conceive of it in terms of the same war as the one to topple Saddam Hussein. They are not being internally inconsistent, but completely consistent. They do not support the war in Iraq because it is the same war they believe was a mistake.
We must begin to speak of two Iraq wars. The two wars conception is more precise. It describes what has happened and what is happening in Iraq more fully than speaking of the war. It clarifies many of the debates surrounding the present war as well as allows us to conceptually think more clearly.
Further, the only way to convince war skeptics that winning the present war in Iraq is in our national interests is to give them the linguistic tools for being able to conceive of it as separate from the first war, even if it flows from it.
The First Iraq War may have been "optional", as many of the critics say; but the Second Iraq war is not. We must win it. The price of victory may be high, but the price of defeat is higher.
*There are also good arguments, in my estimation, that the decision to invade Iraq was correct.
**There may be an argument that Iraq I was an extension of the Gulf War in the same way that some view WWII was an extension of WWI.
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