Why We Are in Iraq
This isn’t Bosnia or Haiti or Somalia. Those were humanitarian military actions, and even, in the case of Bosnia, when Europe wouldn’t act and didn’t want the US to act, or, in the case of Somalia, where the people we were trying to help didn’t want us there, this is purely a war, pursued not for the sake of aiding a weak state suffering at the hands of a stronger belligerent, not to prevent totalitarianism from taking over free states; this is war for the sake of lashing out, war waged to punish, war against a target easy to find. We can say that Saddam Hussein is a tyrant, that he threatens the peace of the Middle East, that he has or will or would deal with terrorists, that he tortures, maims, rapes, and kills his citizens, that he wants and has, will use and has used weapons of mass destruction, and these things are all true. They have been true for 20 years and would be true for 20 more, so it’s undeniable that it’s long past time the world acted to put a stop to him. What a shame, then, that the world wouldn’t act, and that the US and its “coalition of the willing” now suffer the opprobrium of the world for finally acting against this evil man. But wasn’t there a better way? Couldn’t this have been done sooner and without having to go it alone? Must the US act the thug? And now that the war is underway and soldiers are dying and civilians suffering, what can we hope for and what should we do? I will not support this war, but I hope it succeeds. I will not condone the actions of the US, but I will not excuse Saddam Hussein. I am left only to believe we will not abandon the Iraqis to corporate greed and the kind of political turmoil left in the unfinished jobs of the past decades, first among them, Afghanistan and the “war on terror.”