Troop Withdrawal from Iraq Best Option (12/4/05)
by Dean Hartwell
Promoting democracy. Retaliation for 9/11. Middle East stability. Iraqi liberation. Weapons of mass destruction.
None of these reasons were good ones to go to war in Iraq. None of them are good reasons to remain there.
Promoting democracy? The people of Iraq are not ready for it yet and perhaps never will be. They need to establish their own security (i.e. independently of us) before they have any chance of democracy.
Retaliation for 9/11? We know now, despite Bush Administration claims, that Iraq had nothing to do with the attacks of 9/11.
Middle East stability? We removed one aggressive dictator and supplanted him with chaos. True regional stability will only occur when individual nations each have it at home. Invading nations to create stability makes no sense.
Iraqi liberation? Again, we took them out of the oven and put them in the frying pan. They are liberated from Saddam Hussein but not from an insurgency drawn out by the presence of U.S. forces.
Weapons of mass destruction? The only WMDs in this conflict belong to us. The false intelligence relied upon by the Bush Administration brings to mind another war that the U.S. got into with data twisted by intelligence agents, the war in Viet Nam.[1]
Now we hear that we must “support our troops” and that our dead soldiers must not “have died in vain.” But everyone supports the troops. It is just that we can’t truly support what the troops do when they never should have been in Iraq to begin with. As for the dying in vain, the Administration is out of time in trying to come up with a valid reason for the presence of the troops.
The best way to support the troops is to bring them home now. Some of them have spent as many as three years in Iraq on false pretenses. This placement amounts to an imprisonment, not support.
Some argue that bringing the troops home immediately will endanger the people of Iraq. They say that we have a responsibility to protect them. But they are already in danger of attacks by the insurgency now. When we leave, the insurgency will have less reason to attack the Iraqi people.
Others opine that we will appear weak to our opponents and to the rest of the world if we leave. The truth is that we are already looking weak by pursuing a war that should never have been fought. Admitting we were wrong to invade will gain us more credibility worldwide.
Yet others say that terrorists will take over Iraq if we pull our troops out now. This warning about terrorists like Osama bin Laden taking over Iraq sounds much like the warning supporters of the Viet Nam War voiced that the nations around Viet Nam would fall down like “dominos” if we left Viet Nam.
First of all, an insurgency that takes on the United States for months is more than ready to take on any group of hostile terrorists that might enter Iraq.
Secondly, terrorists are not monolithic – it is unlikely that any group of terrorists would find common ground with the insurgency in Iraq. Consider the fact that al Qaeda had no connection to Hussein.
We’ve heard enough of the Administration telling us that things will get better. They said the insurgency would die out after Hussein was captured.
They said the same about the “transfer of sovereignty” to Iraq (which was impossible, anyway, according to world citizen Garry Davis). They said it again about the elections held in January 2005. The insurgency did not fade in the slightest after any of these incidents.
The time to leave Iraq is before another U.S. soldier dies over there. The soldiers are the ones who have risked their lives on our behalf. We failed to make the cause worthy of this sacrifice. Bring the troops home.
[1] http://www.politicalgateway.com/news/read.html?id=5500