You know, one thing I can't stand is being called unpatriotic because I favor getting the hell out of Iraq now. So when I see it in papers, it really bugs hell out of me, and I usually give someone two earsful.
Well, it showed up in Neil Steinberg of the Chicago Sun-Times's column today, so I felt obliged to write back. I'd also like to address this to the 'we must stay' crowd, as well - all my arguments are exactly the same. I just phrased them without all the bad language when I emailed Mr. Steinberg.
Mr. Steinberg,
As a regular reader of your column, I looked at it today and felt simultaneously puzzled and horrified by at least one seeming insinuation in it.
I refer to this quote:
Needless to say, this alarming crime will thrill our enemies, while providing grist for those who would decamp from Iraq immediately, no matter what effect our leaving might have on this unfortunate nation we have placed under our care.
The rest of us, Americans who are proud of our country, or try to be, will be left confused, puzzled and sad. We are the good guys. Aren't we? How did Marines -- the Few, the Proud -- end up shooting babies?
I have to ask: Do you think that those who 'would decamp from Iraq immediately' are not 'proud of our country'? It's not the case, not even a little bit, and to make it seem that way is both highly insulting and much too dismissive of our honest evaluations of what's going on now.
I'm one of those who favors starting to pull out right now. I'd like to take this time to expound on why, in the hopes that my dialogue may prevent such assumptions, intentional or otherwise, from seeing print and being reinforced in the minds of your readers.
I was, like many of the others who agree with me, against the invasion of Iraq from the start. The reasons were multitudinous and I'm sure you've heard many of them before. Yes, Iraq was a country that had WMD in the past, and I argued wrongly that it still had some, even though I was sure that what it had was a militarily negligible amount. I also found the concept of Saddam Hussein giving Al-Qaeda WMD laughable at best - not only does it ignore the history of WMD, since no state had ever given a non-state actor WMD, regardless of the stability of the leader or the geopolitical reality of any point in time after WWII, but it also assumed that Saddam was by definition both less stable than any other world leader with WMD and more prone to make decisions contrary to his personal survival than any other world leader with WMD. The history and psychology of Saddam Hussein (which was examined in great detail in the First Gulf War run-up) made that seem less likely than a 2006 Cubs World Series appearance.
In short, I was more worried about smashing the remains of Al-Qaeda's top leadership than renewing the Gulf War at a time when Saddam was much less dangerous than the Al-Qaeda leaders to the safety of the United States.
I don't think I'm telling any tales when I say that the Iraq invasion, from soup to nuts, was botched. Not when people who urged a larger invasion force such as Shinseki were marginalized and removed, and when people who argued for more diplomacy such as Powell were browbeaten into carrying the propaganda for the invasion in a shameful fashion or dismissed. We were fortunate that the American soldier is truly without peer and had such a tremendous edge on the battlefield that they were able to liberate Iraq, but then after they did their good deed of removing Saddam's grip on power, they were betrayed by the leadership who had no good plan for restoring Iraq to stability and who dreamed about rose petals and cheering crowds instead of dealing with the reality of a ethnically split fragmentation.
This is the same leadership, by the way, which refused to provide proper gear to the troops before invading. The same leadership that thinks it's peachy keen to write stories to embed in the 'free press' of Iraq by paying bribes. The same leadership who misspent reconstruction money so wildly that at least $8 billion of it is completely unaccounted for, and who got such poor results that in the case of electricity and clean water, much of Iraq is worse off now than under Saddam and sanctions. For that matter, the same administration that has not even been able to handle the rescue of an American city from standing water.
Mr. Steinberg, the choice is pretty simple. One can either continue backing the Bush administration to the hilt, or one can call, as Reagan did correctly in Lebanon, to get our troops out of the killing zone. Our troops are not stopping the insurgency, because attacks are up across the board. Our troops are not maintaining civil order outside the Green Zone, as the bodies fished daily out of the Tigris and Euphrates attest to. All our troops are basicially doing is running security in small predetermined spots and waiting for the next sniper, or carbomber, or IED to come and take another 2 or 3 (or more) good Americans with them. Given this administration's track record, there is no logical reason to stay - they are not helping to increase security for either our troops or Iraqis, and the chances that they will make the correct diplomatic and political moves to fix things (when they've shown 5 years of recordbreaking incompetence) are so low that I've seen better odds on a Cub pitcher throwing a perfect game.
To sum up, Mr. Steinberg, I support getting out now because the crew of clowns running the show aren't going to do much of anything besides get a whole lot of people killed who don't need to be, and 2 1/2 years is a lot of dead Americans and Iraqis to have to live with because we couldn't show the courage of a Reagan and realize when all we can do is break more stuff if we stay in the pottery barn.
I forgot to mention that I think your view on the massacre is absolutely correct, by the way. I don't know a single soldier who would take pleasure in shooting helpless women and children like this. As you pointed out, it's an inevitability of the mission and the circumstances. I'd just like to say that I'd prefer never to see another Haditha repeated while the administration runs in place, and I don't think anyone else would like to see a repeat either. But that WILL happen the longer our troops stay.
Anyways, it's my fervent hope that you clarify your remarks in a subsequent column, as I'd hate to think that you meant I (and others like me) aren't patriotic Americans.
There it is in a nutshell, folks. Are you willing to let BushCo run with this war for at least the next 3 years? Do you trust them to 'do the right thing' when they've done damned little but all the WRONG things since his first inauguration?
Do you trust Donald Rumsfeld to take care of the troops?
Do you trust George Bush to make good use of the information handed to him?
Have we not passed the point where you're sick to death of coffins and body bags and wasted lives and PTSD'd survivors missing limbs and organs, or are there a few MORE soldiers you could stand to lose?
Or do you see what a complete fuckup they've made of the whole thing and refuse to give them another day to kill more Americans with their blundering?
Immediate withdrawal, folks. The only practical solution.