It's Gone All 'Splodey!
It's been a while since I've written about Iraq, so I'm going to do a bit of that now. The pacifists say we should pull out now and cut our losses, because the longer we stay the more life will be lost without us ever achieving our objective. They are absolutely right.
On the other hand, the hawks say to us that we have to stay and finish the job because to do otherwise would demonstrate that we are weak and vulnerable, and another group says we have to stay because we broke it and have an obligation to fix it. They, too, are absolutely right.
How can they both be right? Aren't those positions contradictory and mutually exclusive? Well, yes. And that's the point. We have placed our selves in an impossible situation. There would have been no negative consequences from refraining from invading Iraq. Saddam would still be in power, yes, but he was, in many ways, a lesser evil than the bind we find ourselves in now. Because right now we're damned if we do and damned if we don't.
Ultimately, I think I'm with the doves now. Although I have argued in this space that we should stay and rebuild what we broke, I don't know that it's really possible. Because while repairing broken infrastructure seems the moral thing to do, the thing we really broke was the regime of fear that kept Iraq from breaking down into civil-war and revolution during Saddam's rule. The tensions from all those years are being released right now, and they really want us out of their way so they can kill each other with impunity. And we don't want to go because we know that at the end of it all, there will be another Islamic Republic run by Shiites, and we really don't want that.
But these intramural hostilities simmered under Saddam, and they will simmer until our inevitable leave taking. That being the case, we might as well pull out and let them have done with it, knowing that the blood they spill will be on our hands, and that the atrocities that they will perpetrate upon each other will almost certainly exceed what Saddam perpetrated upon them.
Saddam was the pin in this grenade. And we pulled it.
On the other hand, the hawks say to us that we have to stay and finish the job because to do otherwise would demonstrate that we are weak and vulnerable, and another group says we have to stay because we broke it and have an obligation to fix it. They, too, are absolutely right.
How can they both be right? Aren't those positions contradictory and mutually exclusive? Well, yes. And that's the point. We have placed our selves in an impossible situation. There would have been no negative consequences from refraining from invading Iraq. Saddam would still be in power, yes, but he was, in many ways, a lesser evil than the bind we find ourselves in now. Because right now we're damned if we do and damned if we don't.
Ultimately, I think I'm with the doves now. Although I have argued in this space that we should stay and rebuild what we broke, I don't know that it's really possible. Because while repairing broken infrastructure seems the moral thing to do, the thing we really broke was the regime of fear that kept Iraq from breaking down into civil-war and revolution during Saddam's rule. The tensions from all those years are being released right now, and they really want us out of their way so they can kill each other with impunity. And we don't want to go because we know that at the end of it all, there will be another Islamic Republic run by Shiites, and we really don't want that.
But these intramural hostilities simmered under Saddam, and they will simmer until our inevitable leave taking. That being the case, we might as well pull out and let them have done with it, knowing that the blood they spill will be on our hands, and that the atrocities that they will perpetrate upon each other will almost certainly exceed what Saddam perpetrated upon them.
Saddam was the pin in this grenade. And we pulled it.