No, we don't ask why we should (still) be there. We won the war, we got rid of Saddam Hussein. A new Iraqi government was democratically elected, we handed over sovereignty (did we have it to hand over?) -- so why are we there?
Over the years we have heard a series of answers to why we are there. Lately we are told that the reason we are (still) there is to establish a democracy in the middle of this Muslim part of the world -- and this new government needs our help. They are a sovereign nation; did they ask us?
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Democracy imposed by force? And if force does not work, more force?
Then the other day we were told that now our leader is thinking we should stay there for a long, long time, "like Korea." We kept troops in South Korea to keep an eye on North Korea--and yet, under our very eyes, one of the poorest nations in the world, a gruesome dictatorship, managed to make atom bombs and tested missiles. Ahem.
Who or what do we plan to keep an eye on from Iraq?
Iran of course -- and oll.
That explains why we have been building an enormous embassy--a self-sufficient city--and why we built a number of "permanent bases" in Iraq. That then must have been in the plan from the beginning, and the WMD, the connection with Al-Qaeda, democracy in the Middle East, oh and another hundred-year war against terror, were just a facade?
Of course oil was never mentioned as a reason for regime change in Iraq.
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Our world has become strange and almost alien to me. While I was busy doing other things, living a life, having a career, "they" changed the world when I was not looking. Globalization sounded good, but we were not prepared for outsourcing, or electronic menus to replace people jobs, or a flood of new gadgets we were supposed to buy on an income that bought increasingly less. While we were mesmerized by the bigger and higher definition television screens entertaining us 24 hours a day, wars were fought, people died, two million people fled Iraq, the climate of the world is changing. Our world is no longer the world I knew. This country is harsher, coarser, maybe dumber, than during some other years I recall.
Now that I think of it, we always meddled in other countries' affairs, but it was done in the background, not with shock and awe. Dropping our mighty might in the middle of the Middle East, which everyone knew was a cauldron of problems anyway, we seem to have stirred up more violent terrorism than ever before?
Not in my name, certainly. But then, of course I was not asked, and the people who I chose to represent me in Congress were swept along in the fear we were told we must all fear.
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