Ending the War in Iraq

Without doubt, learning that we have sent hundreds of thousands of our children, husbands, wives, sisters, and daughters off to fight and die in a foreign land, on a suspect mission has caused our country’s mood to be a bit sour. The worst part of not finding WMD in Iraq is that there were US politicians who continue to be held in high esteem, who would not simply admit that something has gone terribly wrong, and that the price paid is too high. Instead, some of our most respected and senior officials sought to continue the charade, suggesting that perhaps a nuclear weapons program that supposedly was an imminent threat just months earlier, had been moved underground in Iraq.

Was it possible that the same sophisticated satellite system that had revealed the locations of underground bunkers that were being destroyed by bunker busting bombs could not reveal a massive hole being dug and an entire nuclear weapons project being buried underground. No one even attempted to explain why the US troops on the ground during the period between the invasion and the search for the nuclear weapons program did not see any digging, or burying of Iraq’s nuclear weapons project. If pressed on the issue, the answer was that such information; or rather explanations and excuses are classified.

Also important is the fact that no one, even as we were supposedly waiting for Saddam Hussein to prove that he had in fact disassembled his nuclear weapons program years earlier, thought to simply request that the UN submit its records to its own Security Council. UN inspection records proved that Iraq had in fact ended its nuclear weapons program and those UN inspectors had seen the evidence and were satisfied that Iraq had no nuclear weapons program that posed an imminent threat to anyone.

The Iraq war incident will go down in history as the greatest lie with the most horrible consequences, ever told. More than 4000 Americans dead, thousands of more brain damaged and disabled, and a record number killed by their own hands, a result of the evil racist pseudo religious fanaticism that was allowed to seep into the ways of war, transforming some of our soldiers from honorable men and women, into murderers, torturers and ideologues, killing and intimidating people and destroying their lives, simply because they are different. War might be hell, but our military is not intended to be the devil. Our mythology is heroic and honorable, and we have always believed that we send our soldiers into the battlefield as honorable and heroic men and women.

It has always been our country’s intention to serve the world as protectors of the weak. Until now, we have seen ourselves as not only an honorable people, but also as a virtuous people, bound together by a Constitution that conveys high ideas, and laws that stand as a guard between society and the misguided passions of extremist political factions, and especially those extremist factions that disguise themselves as the Church, the Synagogue, and/or the Mosque.

Iraq has demonstrated to us why it is so important that we protect the US Constitution and demand that it be adhered to, no matter under what circumstance. There is no doctrine that has proven its merit to any greater degree than our Constitutional doctrine of liberty that guided our country over 250 years of the greatest challenges and accomplishments in the history of modern mankind. The US Constitution is not merely a piece of paper, and it is not a theory. It is an idea that has yielded unmatched progress for a people bound by nothing more than belief in its simple, but powerful pronouncement of equality, liberty, and justice for all.

As our government continued to talk of victory in the Iraq war, it was becoming painfully apparent that victory has many meanings. To date, we have only been told that victory in Iraq means leaving Iraq stable, free of Al-Qadea and a friend to the US. Those who understand what stability means, know that Iraq will never stabilize so long as there are US troops on the ground in Iraq, and a war. Stability does not mean merely a cessation of violence. It means that the country has reached a point where its peace is sustainable without the use of military force. It is also common knowledge that Al Qadea fighters represent a small number of those who are fighting the US in Iraq. Most of the fighters are indigenous Iraqis who are fighting us because we invaded their country. They will not stop fighting us until the war is over. We can end this war through a treaty, or simply by declaration that our mission has been accomplished, the war is ended and we are mounting a diplomatic mission in Iraq that is aimed primarily at restoration.

As for Iraq being friends to the US and Israel…forget about that. Israel’s arming and military training of Iraq’s Kurds who were turned loose to carry out violence against other Iraqis in an attempt to carve out and create an area of Iraq, one with oil, that would serve the US and Israel has failed. That project is not likely to succeed because neither Turkey, nor Iran, nor Syria, nor Saudi Arabia, nor Jordan is likely to tolerate having an Israeli controlled Kurdish area of Iraq in their backyards, that is siphoning off Iraq’s oil to fuel Israel’s long hoped for period of development and industrialization, and its continued militarization of the region. Israel has sought to prevent the economic, political and social development of the Middle East countries by keeping the region impoverished, illiterate, politically paralyzed and at war. Ironically, as part of that region, Israel is doing the same to itself, and no amount of US money, or military might will be able to extricate Israel from its own self inflicted suffering.

It is time for the US to end the war in Iraq, and to bring our troops home. Our country cannot begin the much needed process of healing, so long as we are embroiled in a war. We cannot continue to worsen the wound, and expect to also heal. The Iraq war is nothing more than an attempt to recreate the Arab world in an ugly and unjust neo-conservative Zionist image. It is an image that the world, and most Americans reject, and rightly so.