Watching Anderson Cooper (as usual) tonight, listening to the generals and troops on the field, and I realized something rather striking.
I support the war in Iraq.
It sounds kind of silly, doesn't it? I've been opposed to the invasion since the beginning, and have written about my feelings here and elsewhere. And yet.
Let's face it. Iraq under Saddam was a s**thole. Hussein was a brutal tyrant whose sons (heirs to the throne) went around raping and butchering women for fun, and murdering innocents as sport. On balance, the world is incalcuably better off now that they no longer exist.
But its more than that. The idea that Arabs aren't "ready" for Democracy, or that they were "doing fine" under an evil despot, is so inconceivably racist to me that I refuse to believe anyone who claims to be "liberal" or "progressive" could ever support it. OF COURSE Democratic government is preferable to tyranny -- if you don't believe that, you're not a liberal, you're not a Democrat, you're not a progressive, and you're frankly not a very bright person.
Issues aren't always black and white. You can believe, as I do, that the decision to go to war in Iraq was a mistake, and that most major strategic decisions have been bungled. But you cannot, as progressives, support the absurd notion that the Iraqi people were "better off" under a dictatorship. No one who cares about the rights of individuals, of women, of gays, or anything else we claim to defend, can claim that Saddam Hussein was preferable to American intervention. We seem to be caught up in hating everything Bush does, that we lose sight of the degrees of evil facing the world. Does Bush suck? Yes, a thousand times yes. One of the worst Presidents in American history, and I've signed my name to every pro-impeachment signature-collector I've seen thus far. Is Bush "as evil" as Saddam Hussein? That's an emphatic HELL THE FUCK NO. (And to those of you who disagree, for the love of science, are you kidding? Open a history book.)
So.
The war in Iraq is something I fought against. It was a war of choice, not necessity. It distracted from the real war effort against Taliban leaders and Al Qaeda. But since we're there, I support a goal of victory. Do you think losing the war in Iraq will "teach Bush a lesson"? Do you think it will be "just desserts"? Is that petty reason really enough to wish a country into chaos and collapse? Is our hate for George Bush so great that we'd sentence hundreds of thousands of innocent lives to torture and death, rather than hope and pray that Bush's plan ends up working after all?
Supporting the War in Iraq doesn't mean you agree with it. It doesn't mean you would have voted for it. It doesn't mean you support our President. Supporting the War in Iraq means that you hope, pray, believe, cross your fingers, and wish with every fiber of your being that we WIN the war, that Iraq becomes stable, and a beacon of Democracy slowly but surely takes hold in the Middle East. If you hope and pray Iraq gets worse, you are not a Democrat. You are not a progessive. You are not a liberal. And, frankly, you are not particularly human.
Let's work on the task at hand: impeaching Bush and Cheney, and/or at least assuring the Republican nominee loses is an embarassing landslide in 2008. And yes, let's come up with a plan to get our soldiers out of a country we shouldn't have invaded in the first place. But let's also remember the principles we're fighting for, too. And hold out hope that Iraq works after all.