Rick's Ramblings

Thursday, September 02, 2004

My Thoughts on the War in Iraq

It seems there is a lot of “revisionist history” being written around the Iraqi War. When Mr. Bush decided to invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam, the stated reason was to “find and eliminate weapons of mass destruction and preemptively stop an imminent terrorist attack on the United States”. Clearly, neither of these was true. So, the new reason for the invasion is to “eliminate a brutal dictator who was suppressing and oppressing the people of Iraq, torturing people, engaging in mass murder, etc.”—All of which is true, but was not the original reason for the invasion.

And, if that is the motivation for invasion, then what are we going to do about Sudan, or Iran, or North Korea, or any other place in the world where brutal dictators are oppressing the population, engaging in torture or ethnic cleansing, etc? Are we going to impose the same high moral standards on them that we applied to Iraq and Saddam? Are they the next targets for preemptive war? If not, why?

The invasion was a mistake. And, the current administration, rather than admitting the mistake and minimizing the damage, is attempting to change history, and in the process is lying to the American public.

There are many negative implications of this mistake, implications that will haunt the U.S. for many years to come:

1. We have given up our role as a collaborative leader of the free world. We are now isolated in the international community. We did not listen to the concerns and advise of our strongest friends and allies. Instead, we arrogantly went forward with a preemptive war based on false data and assumptions. We should be embarrassed and humble, but continue to stake out the high moral ground and arrogantly assert our “rightness”.

2. We have strengthened the foundation on which fundamentalist terrorists base their hatred. We have created more terrorists and expanded the terrorist base geographically by not understanding the underlying motivations of terrorists and instead of decreasing those motivations, we’ve increased them.

3. We have lost about 1000 American lives—the lives of brave young men and women who did their job and followed the orders of their Commander-in-Chief.

4. We are spending billions and billions of dollars on a war effort. Money that we don’t have, in part because of tax cuts and lower revenues. This is creating a record national deficit that our children and grandchildren will have to deal with. Their standard of
living will be lower because of it.

I will confess to feeling a tremendous amount of pride in America and pride in George Bush when he led the effort to eliminate the Taliban in Afganistan and Al Qaeda after September 11, 2001. I must also confess to feeling disappointment and frustration that those efforts are now marginalized while we fight a battle in the war on terrorism on a false front that is distracting us from the real job we have in front of us—a job of leadership among nations; a job of collaborating with allies to fight terrorism; a job of resolving the underlying issues that motivate terrorism; a job of building a strong, confident America.

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