…I wrote for the Savage Pacer. I’ve included the original unedited version below.
First of all, I’d like to commend Syd Gross for an excellent article in last week’s Community Voices regarding the futility, horror, and wastefulness of the Iraq war.
Secondly, I felt compelled to respond to John Benedict’s letter to the editor from last week. The basic gist of Mr. Benedict’s message is that the so-called “liberal media” isn’t reporting all the “good stuff” from the war, and that we don’t have any right to second-guess the all-knowing and all-powerful Oz…I mean, President.
To begin with, I wish we did have a “liberal media.” Maybe then every newscast would lead off with images of coffins being returned to the United States on a daily basis, and children and women lying dead in the streets of Iraq. But George Bush has prohibited footage of any returning caskets being shown, and we don’t like to be disturbed by seeing the awfulness of war on our evening news. Perhaps because if we were faced daily with the graphic reality of the horror that is the Iraq war, we’d be quicker to demand that our troops come home.
While there is no doubt, as Mr. Benedict says, that some good things have come from the occupation of Iraq, the fact is that this is an un-winnable war, and it’s time for us to leave. First of all, this is a civil war. There is no traditional “enemy” for us to fight, or “win” against. Roughly 60 percent of Iraq is Shiite Muslim, and about 35 percent is Sunni Muslim. The divide and conflict between these two groups dates back about 1400 years – and we’re caught in the middle. If we back the Sunnis, we anger the Arab nations, including Saudi Arabia. If we back the Shiites, we provoke Iran even further. George Bush keeps talking about “winning”, but there is no winning here: this is a centuries-old clash, and our presence there is fanning the flames.
Our own history teaches us that it’s incredibly difficult to impose democracy – it’s taken the United States 300+ years, and we still don’t have it right. We started with the brutal annihilation of Native Americans, followed it with the brutal oppression and slavery of blacks, had a Civil War of our own, continued with suppression of women’s rights, and are still struggling today with gay rights and voter rights (but that’s another story). It’s incredibly naïve to think we can impose democracy on Iraq by force in just a few short years, while overcoming over a thousand years of religious and cultural strife.
Lastly, the idea that Mr. Benedict promotes that we should trust this President to know and do the right thing is laughable. Bush is the guy that pulled weapons inspectors out of Iraq (where they found no weapons of mass destruction, by the way), and manufactured evidence (if you don’t believe that, try Googling “Italian letter Iraq”) to manipulate Congress and the American public into going to war. He then continued the falsehood by promoting the lie that Iraq had something to do with 9/11. And if you still think that there is a connection there, perhaps you should read the 9/11 Commission report from Congress, which found no link at all between 9/11 and the government of Iraq. It did, raise some interesting questions about ties between the terrorist organization Al Qaeda and Saudi Arabia – an ally of ours. This President is interested in his image, power, and oil, not in what’s good for the people of Iraq or the United States.
Americans should be mad as hell. Mad that we’re mired in an endless war that’s ruining our economy for generations, killing our soldiers, and killing hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis. Mad that we’ve been lied to and misled continuously by our government. Mad that companies like Halliburton and Blackwater have stolen billions from YOU, the taxpayer, in falsified and shoddy work in Iraq reconstruction, and virtually nothing has been done about it (see the movie Iraq for Sale if you really want to get mad). Mad that our government is ignoring the 60+ percent of Americans who want our troops home as soon as possible.
Remember: the President and government are work for us, not the other way around. Get involved.