Christian Democrats in the United States
Global Issues - IraqThe U.S. mission should be to bring Syria, Saudi Arabia and Iran to the table to stop the balkanization of Iraq. Front-line troops should be empowered with effective body armor, armored vehicles and more non-lethal weapons, as well as discretionary humanitarian budgets. Every single field soldier should be required to work on training courses for local languages and criminal justice, each at least a half hour a day five days a week.
The U.S. should loan against oil futures to Iraq for public works employment in the style of the New Deal, beginning with the Hanging Gardens, and should equip Iraqi police forces adequately with trackable equipment. Offensive sieges of Iraqi cities only serve to recruit more resistance and must come to an end by pushing Iraqi forces into greater responsibility now. The U.S. must develop a withdrawal timeline that allows us peace with honor in Iraq but will not leave the Iraqi people to suffer at the hands of religious terrorists.
World War I started in the Balkans area of eastern Europe when small fighting factions got the support of different major European powers. Because those major powers were ruled by short-sighted idiots with big egos and personal agendas who refused to talk directly to each other, all of Europe collapsed into war. We cannot let this happen anywhere in a nuclear age. The United States can talk civilly with its rivals without sacrificing our values. It is impossible to negotiate with terrorists, but nevertheless, lines of communication should not be closed, to leave the door open for reasonable people caught up in the war who want to return to peaceful society.
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The Iraqi people have to realize that they must come together — Sunni and Shia — to defeat the mindless violence of terrorism, not for U.S. interests but for their own.It's clear that abandoning the Iraqi people at this critical time would leave blood on the hands of the United States, though those hands are already stained.
However, it just goes to show Bush's naivety that he would say the Iraq war is justified because pulling out would be similar to the backlash against South Vietnam after we pulled out.
Vietnam was another mismanaged war. Kennedy had the chance to wind it down and get out before it got out of control, but he was killed. Johnson had the chance to get it over with by cutting Hanoi's supply lines, but instead he played a stalemate and turned the country into a meat grinder for years to come, leading to the senseless death of hundreds of thousands of Americans and millions of Vietnamese. In Vietnam, the U.S. waged war not against the communist leaders but against the common people-turned-soldiers, which only drove the people to support the communists. The principle of resisting communism might have been justified, but the senseless bloodshed without tactical or strategic value perpetrated by both sides of the conflict was not.
In that respect there might be hope for Iraq, that the common people of Iraq are beginning to realize that al-Qaida cares less about their welfare than the United States does. They are beginning to realize that the U.S. is the lesser of their choice of evils.
But that's coming from them, not from Bush, and considering this hope, Iraq is much different from Vietnam. Bush cannot take credit for the will of the Iraqi people. No political leader can ever take credit for the will of the people. The solution will come from the people, not from the leaders.
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