It's ironic and moronic the way hardcore right-wing Iraq war supporters, including some soldiers, simultaneously express concern and hatred for Iraqis.
They claim there will be massive sectarian bloodshed if the United States pulls out of Iraq, so we must stay to prevent it.
Many of this ilk turn right around and claim all Iraqis should be considered insurgents or supporters of insurgents. Some even say we should flatten the entire Middle East. (They typically say "kill them all" or "make it glass," meaning nuke the Middle East, melting the sand and turning it into glass.)
Some of my right-wing clients told me this face-to-face and in all-capital-lettered email replies to my anti-war emails over the last 4 years (we parted ways after these exchanges). I even had two clients tell me that if the U.S. is only in Iraq for oil, all the better: "take their oil!" they said. All of these clients are wealthy business owners or executives, including, amazingly, two graduates of U.C. Berkeley, that so-called bastion of liberal thought.
Based on their argument and preferred outcome, though, leaving Iraq would achieve the same goal.
Option1: Stay in Iraq and treat all Iraqis as insurgents, killing, maiming and torturing many innocents.
versus
Option 2: Leave Iraq and let Iraqis kill, maim and torture themselves.
Since the outcome would be the same by right-wing reasoning, why spend U.S. lives and tax dollars to accomplish what Iraqis would do for free?
This cynical jab is meant for hardcore right-wingers infected with the old "destroy the village to save it" martial virus, which causes massive swelling of the testicles and severe mobility problems. The above rejoinder neuters their ballsy assertions but, unfortunately, doesn’t kill the virus, an infinitely more difficult task.
Of course, if our militant right-wingers were to receive our "wasted" tax dollars as payments to their own companies, option 1 is best for them since they would make a killing in every way.
I don't believe Iraq would devolve into genocidal insanity if the U.S. left, but countries bordering Iraq would rush in to stake claims.
One wealthy militant client of mine from Oklahoma apparently tried to show his "Independent" streak when he said, "You know my view of the Middle East; it’s the same as my view the south: make it glass." A couple of times he worked on his gun collection while I worked on his computer and once he even asked me to assemble his M1 rifle for him when he became frustrated with the trigger assembly.
I live in a very liberal area of the U.S. but have (or rather used to have) several wealthy extreme right-wing clients in other areas who showed their true colors during the Iraq war. They included business owners from South Carolina, Oklahoma, mostly California and a few other states.
One former client, a company president from South Carolina, had a big glossy photo of Bush on his office wall and told me our troops have no right to complain because they volunteered, so tough luck for them. He was impervious to reason and incessantly and completely shunned hard evidence, usually with a smirk, as if truth was part of a game to be played and manipulated. We parted ways after I gave him a deck of Hillary Clinton playing cards (before H. Clinton wore her corporate cronyism on her sleeve) and sent him an email quoting "Cracker Culture" by Grady McWhiney about his home state (see EXHIBIT A below).
EXHIBIT A
Here’s part of my email that ended my work with that Bush-fawning big-GOP-donor client from South Carolina. (And now I can't help but wonder how 2007 Miss South Carolina's ancestors fit into the historical picture.)
[Sent July, 2004]
"Ahhhh.... Now I understand what we're up against with Bush supporters...
"From ‘Cracker Culture’ by Grady McWhiney, pp. 193-199:"
-------------------------
"As early as 1753 the governor of South Carolina observed that the people of the upcountry ‘abound in Children, but none of them bestow the least Education on them, they take so much care in raising a Litter of Piggs, their Children are equally naked and full as Nasty.’
"...On the eve of the American Revolution the Reverend Charles Woodmason described backcountry Carolinians as being ignorant and impudent. ‘Very few can read—fewer write,’ he noted. ‘Few or no Books are to be found in all this vast Country.’"
"...Formal education enjoyed scarcely more respect among plain Southerners at the end of the antebellum period than it had in colonial times. In 1834 a Virginian reported that fewer than half of his neighbors ever looked at a newspaper, and about this same time a South Carolinian confessed that more than a third of the white people in his state were illiterate."
"...Some scholars have argued that the white folk of the Old South received relatively more schooling than is often acknowledged, and it is true that by 1861 there were more children in school in the South than at any previous time, but most of these schools were privately and inadequately supported. Rarely did they provide quality or effective instruction."
"...In 1850 the federal census reported that more than 20 percent of the South's native whites could neither read nor write, compared with only 0.42 percent of New England's. A Maine physician, who had traveled in the South, contended that there were many more illiterate Southerners than the census indicated. He found not only the ‘non-slaveholders . . . ignorant and degraded, but . . . the slaveholders in the planting districts . . . quite as destitute of learning as the poor whites,’ and he reported that a friend once ‘called on 21 families of slaveholders, and found only two -- a man and his wife -- who could read.’"
"...A visiting foreigner claimed that in the South ‘the general ignorance of the parents . . . makes them attach no value to the education of their children.’
"...Despite the efforts of such idealists as Thomas Jefferson and Archibald D. Murphey, the only southern states to adopt systems of free public education prior to the Civil War were Kentucky and North Carolina. German-born Christopher G. Memminger tried unsuccessfully in South Carolina to secure statewide public schools similar to those in Charleston. School laws in Louisiana looked impressive but were rarely enforced; one teacher's certificate bore the marks, rather than the signatures, of twelve parish school directors. Late in the antebellum period the state school superintendent recommended to the Louisiana legislature that at least two of the state's three directors of common schools should be required by law to know how to read and write. Even in North Carolina, which boasted the most educationally advanced common school system in the Old South, classes met only four months a year."
"...There was much opposition to North Carolina's public school system, which developed slowly and imperfectly. In 1800 a newspaper reported that nine-tenths of the North Carolinians were illiterate."
"...There were, of course, well-educated people in the Old South. Some of them could match knowledge and pens with the best of northern scholars. Frank L. Owsley has pointed out that ‘if college attendance is any test of an educated people, the South had more educated men and women in proportion to population than the North, or any other part of the world.’ In 1860, 1 out of every 247 whites in the South was attending college, compared with only 1 out of every 703 in the North. What Owsley fails to reveal is how poor were some of the colleges Southerners attended and how little was learned by some students. The records of student life at many southern colleges reveal that drinking, gambling, and carousing were the rule rather than the exception."
[All emphases added.]