Why Are We There?

There are a million different aspects of this war to be weighed when trying to decide what to think about it, but for me it eventually comes down to this conclusion: if Iraqi (or Chinese or Russian or Vietnamese or anybody else's) tanks were rolling down Broad Street I would be one of the first guys out there with a gun, and I'd probably figure out pretty quickly how to make a car bomb. However, unless I was completely convinced that a threat of that nature was imminent I would never - could never - find it necessary to kill.

If my friends and family were directly endangered I wouldn't hesitate for a moment to fight, but until then I have to apply the most rigorous skepticism to any attempt to get me to do so. There are a number of reasons for this: to avoid unnecessary violence, to avoid distraction from other sources of danger, to preserve my ability to defend myself, to preserve the strength of my word if I threaten to fight, etc. Rigorous skepticism, or any skepticism at all really, reveals that Iraq never posed this type of serious threat, and what's more the decision to invade has weakened our country in all of the predictable ways.

Not only that, but in this war we are the foreign invaders, ours are the tanks rolling down neighborhood streets, and the insurgents who we are killing daily are the very people we're trying to help. How can we "win hearts and minds" when those hearts and minds belong to family and friends of young men who are killed for doing exactly what I just said I'd do in their place? I'm not blaming this solely on us, because the insurgents have clever ways of pitting the populace against us, but the situation is by its very nature unwinnable.

The point is that if our goal was to find the WMDs we're finished because they were never there. If our goal was to remove Saddam you can head on over to Youtube and watch him be hanged. If our goal was to stop al-Qaeda and Osama then Iraq is a wild goose chase that only serves to help al-Qaeda recruitment. If our goal was to plant the seeds of democracy then I don't think we would have agreed to go over there in the first place, but it could be argued that the seeds have been planted and they just can't grow because we keep on bleeding all over the ground.

So, we shouldn't have started the war, and even if you allow that starting it was somehow necessary we've done what we came to do. Yet nobody's willing to explain when we can end the war, or why we haven't ended it already, and in the meantime we're grasping at so many straws that we're unwittingly training the enemy and alternately funding opposite sides of the civil war, while the death toll constantly climbs. It should not fall to us anti-war people to keep saying that this must end, it should be the burden of the supporters to prove that it has any reason to continue.