One of the things that gets me about the Iraq war is that the reason justifying us being over there is ever changing. The one reason that bothers me the most is this one: "If we leave now, then all the soldiers who have died would have died in vain." Following this line of reasoning, we can never leave Iraq. Because unless things are "just so," then soldiers would have died in vain. Following this line of reasoning, Napoleon should still be invading Russia. Because, otherwise, his soldiers have died in vain.
If you are down to using this excuse, that says to me, "Hey, all our other excuses aren't working. Let's trot out ol' reliable." President Lyndon B. Johnson, aka my least favorite president ever, used this excuse during Vietnam. The thing with this excuse is that it does not make sense. It don't work. That dog don't hunt, my friends. If we are down to using this excuse, we are all but admitting that our soldiers are dying in vain. If this is our reason for fighting in Iraq, why did we start fighting in the first place? There was a time when not one soldier had died.
The subtext of all this is that President George W. Bush wants to push this war until January 2009. Whatever happens after that can be blamed on the next guy. Or gal. He thinks this whole "kicking the can down the road" routine will salvage his legacy. Wrong, friendo. We all know this is President Bush's War. It is no one else's.
You're so vain, Mr. President. If you think this post is about you, you'd be right.
Saturday, April 5, 2008
Suppose You Started a War and Screwed Everything Up
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8 comments:
You're absolutely right; that is a throwaway reason to stay in the war.
It's infuriating that people will persist in throwing that so-called reason out there, especially when there are so many solid and compelling ones.
It's not exactly like Napoleon should STILL be invading Russia. But it would be kind of like Nazi Germany STILL having a stronghold over Europe.
When people say "Another 100 years in Iraq?! It's an outrage!", I think the are automatically assuming we're talking active combat. And that would be horrible on many levels, I agree.
Thing is, we still have US forces in South Korea and Germany, and putting them there was necessary. This is not different, except for the fact that it's worse because we're not taking down A leader (Hitler) or A country (Imperial Japan) or A political movement (facism). We're talking about trying to protect the free world from a global, insidious mentality that calls for our destruction.
It is a critical difference.
Perhaps the critical difference here is the similarity involving covering countries because of a global insidious mentality that calls for our destruction that is a severe mental state that is not entirely necessary. I am not very well read on politics, but it seems that such highly subjective words are not convincing, and makes me confused and disturbed why we (U.S.) has to place our nose in South Korea and Germany, still, esp. now that we have no reason to believe in a call for our 'destruction'. It seems alot of the times we have our noses in other people's business all the time, and fight for no other reason than we are the Superpower. It just seems.
Why we we had to place our nose in Germany and South Korea... okay... well, the defeat of Naizism and helping preserve the freedom of the South Koreans who were being attacked by communist North Korea. Those are noble causes. Keeping our noses out of Europe during WWII until we ourselves were attacked; understandable on some level because nobody wants to be at war - but how many lives could have been saved if our noses got involved a bit earlier, if our tanks rolled into Auschwitz a little sooner?
There is minding your own business and there is exercising your conscience and trying to help mankind out of a situation where a tyrant is committing genocide.
That applies to Iraqis under Sadam's regime too, conveniently.
Thomas...did you say LBJ is your least favorite president ever? Must be a typo...
Not a typo, Josh. True story.
It would be wonderful granted, that preemption is completely about the protection of mankind and granted that we have done wonderful works to save mankind; unfortunately, is it distinctly about saving mankind from genocide anymore? Do we have our hearts in the right place, because it really doesn't appear that we do.
We can defend ourselves all day long if we want to about our rights to defend mankind, but that still doesn't excuse the idealistic notion of preemption, when in actuality we would have no clue whether or not we are always doing the right thing, and if we are simply replacing "what is right" with "what appears to be right". We only have a representation from prior experiences to guide us, and I might agree with preemption from past experience, but are we really following along? Are we learning? Not every war is about exercisng our conscience, and our conscience isn't exactly honest these days.
How many lives could have been saved if we had intervened earlier during WWII? I don't know, possibly countless numbers. Sadly, that isn't the truth because it didn't happen. For Iraq, specifically speaking, in the now, in the present moment, is it even close to the same idea? Or is conveniently relative?
Convenient was not the correct choice of words; good point.
And no, the U.S.A. is not perfect. It is grievously flawed in many ways, and I am not blind to it. Do we act, as a nation, on our collective conscience? Do we even HAVE a collective conscience? I don't know.
But I do know the collective threat (not strictly Bin Laden, nor Ahmadinajad, nor - well, pick one of several - ) to The West is relentless and unwavering in its resolve to take us down. It won't go away with the deposition of Sadam.
And if this collective enemy is not at your feet, it will be at your throat.
And I'm not ashamed to say it's frightening to me. And that if it comes down to Them Or Us - well, shoot, I vote for Us.
I never understand why some people think that to hold ourselves, the United States of America, to any kind of standard means you hate the United States. We are the United States. We can walk around and chew bubble gum at the same time. We can also set some standards for how we should act and we should be able to meet them.
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