More and more Americans who voted for the current president are suffering from "buyer's remorse." Likewise, many of us think we were bamboozled into letting the administration trade in Afghanistan for Iraq.
Meanwhile, the US supposedly pays compensation for each citizen of Iraq who is killed. But there's no warranty on the country, which we ran into the ground.
If ever there was a lemon of a war, this is it.
Still, our presence in Iraq may never invoke the outrage from Americans that Vietnam did. After all, there's no draft. Nor did natives of Southeast Asia kill 3,000-plus Americans on our own soil like those from the Middle-East did.
Most of us are unopposed to preemptive war on principle. But we can no longer stomach the idea that our soldiers are dying in a war which epitomizes that support-group chestnut "half measures avail us nothing."
But, concerned it will be spun as a victory by the terrorists, we balk at calls for withdrawal. Then there are the commentators and congressmen who, despite how implausible they sound, guilt-trip us about abandoning the Iraqi people.
Let those concerned with abandonment try this story on for size. "No One Dares to Help," written by an anonymous Iraqi reporter for the Los Angeles Times, describes the aftermath of a shooting in his neighborhood. An injured man lay in the street, but no one dared step forward to help him.
He "managed to sit up and wave to passing cars. No one stopped. Then, a white Volkswagen pulled up. A passenger stepped out with a gun, walked steadily to the wounded man and shot him three times."
If that scene isn't the definition of abandonment, ask the families of the 6,599 Iraqis (reported) who died in July and August just how reassuring they've found American troops in their fabled city.
In fact, not only doesn't it prevent violent death, our presence seems to bring out the worst in the killers. As U.N. special investigator Manfred Nowak attests, torture in Iraq may now be worse than it was under Saddam Hussein. That sound you hear is the splat of the at-least-Iraq-is-better-off-than-under-Saddam argument hitting the ground after it was tossed out the window.
But Saddam may have set an unconscious benchmark for brutality in the minds of Shiites he oppressed. Likewise, American abuses at Abu Ghraib may have paved the way for Iraqis to season their savagery with a soupcon of the erotic. More likely though it was an accident waiting to happen.
In his fiction, an Army Ranger acquaintance who served in Iraq describes insurgents he encountered: "Sex fiends. . . beating their wives, raping their sisters, living in their own filth. . . . It was as if all the freaks in a region had started a terrorist organization."
In July, Patrick Cockburn, correspondent for The Independent, wrote of Iraqis who kidnap children and, despite collecting ransoms, rape and kill them. Then of course there's Nic Robertson's infamous CNN report -- call it apocryphal at your own peril -- of a 15-year-old girl whose head had been severed and, in its place, a dog's head sewn.
First, by personalizing killing, cutting your victim's throat is unprofessional. Whatever happened to the cold-blooded executioner with both an axe and nerves of steel?
Second, not only doesn't "ghoulish" do justice to the substitution of an animal's head for a human female's, but neither does "necrophiliac." In fact, if ever there was an occasion to invoke the term "Satanism" without fear of being called a crank, this is it. Even if we did create the preconditions, stooping to this level of barbarity is their choice.
Therefore, both to stop these psychopaths, as well as out of respect for their victims, most Americans shun the "cut-and-run" bunch. But there's an alternative -- the carve-it-up crowd.
Russ Wellen is the nuclear deproliferation editor for OpEdNews. He's also on the staffs of Freezerbox and Scholars & Rogues.
"It's hard to tell people not to smoke when you have a cigarette dangling from your mouth." -- Mohamed El Baradei, Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency
The US has created massive unemployment, looted the country and used air power to wipe out entire cities and infrastructure (doing the same thing as Vietnam but far worse).
The US must leave the country and pay reparations until the country is working again. Intermarrage was NOT uncommon among the people before the US got there so they did live together. The US did NOT hire Iraqi people to do the work. Iraq lost nearly all of it's businesses that could have fixed the country.
Third option: Arab corporations from multiple nations, both Sunni and Shia could work with Iraqi firms for rebuilding government and the money to fix it, since America and American's were so happy to destroy it, must pay 90% of all charges. The US will never again go to battle based upon lies without questions from congress and a written act of war by congress since this would force the US into a long depression that it deserves for one of the worst criminal invasions since Germany wiped out Poland. It should be a binding moral obligation. America broke it with the cheering squad of the majority of Americans. The US pays for fixing it and we know that US corporations and foreign shell companies and subsidiaries are infinitely too corrupt to do the job (far worse than the palm greasing that happens in developing nations).
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Jim Reinhart (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 60 comments)
on Monday, October 2, 2006 at 8:46:53 AM
The people of the United States of America are responsible, lies and all if they refuse to take the leadership that they voted into office, out of office for an act of agression that has no fuction other than creating a base of operations for further military action.
Since the American people refuse to remove these people from office, it is their moral and legal obligation to pay all reparations. Regime change and break up of Iraq is not an option for an illegal offensive operation.
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Jim Reinhart (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 60 comments)
on Monday, October 2, 2006 at 10:06:11 AM
You write, "In the end, as Robert Dreyfuss explains in his September Washington Monthly piece "A Higher Power," we have two choices. Either we stay and fight, whatever the cost in lives and money, or we redeploy and ask Iraq's neighbors and the United Nations to step in. (Kindly contain your snickering.)
Persuading others (aside from our colony, Great Britain) to join us in our excellent Iraq adventure has always been little more than attempted extortion. At this point, what possible incentive exists for the UN and other countries to bail us out?"
Incentives I can think of are: 1) establishing peace in the Middle East; 2) strengthening of the UN; 3) kicking the U.S. in the ass, as many countries would like to do; 4) an equitable distribution of the oil, being largely used to rebuild Irag; 5) generally changing the course of history, from insanity to sanity.
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