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The last of our troops who were stationed in Iraq will be home within the next few weeks. This will mark the end of an era. It is an end of a war that many Americans have felt was ill advised and poorly executed. It is the end of a war that cost thousands of American lives and injured many more thousands of our troops. It ends eight and a half years of being mired in mideast quicksand on a mission we announced as accomplished within weeks of the invasion. Almost eight in ten Americans believe that getting out of Iraq is the right thing to do.
So why does this end of a war deserve this article? Simple....... Listen to every Republican presidential candidate, with the exception of Ron Paul, and what do you hear? The United States is wrong to be leaving Iraq this quickly. The job is not done. We should be leaving anywhere from 20,000 to 50,000 troops permanently stationed in Iraq. We should immediately reopen talks with the Iraqi government and insist on our right to maintain a troop presence. Our president is using poor judgement in ending war.
Remember, this is Iraq. This was a war predicated, at best, on faulty intelligence and, at worst, on a series of executive branch lies to the American people. This was a war against a people who were ruled by a disgusting dictator, but not the dictator who was involved in the September 11th attacks on the United States. This was a war that never had clear goals, but managed to take up eight and a half years. A period about twice as long as our active involvement in World War II.
Yet the Republican candidates for President would like to see us remain in Iraq. They would also like the United States to increase our presence in Afghanistan and take an increasingly militaristic turn against Iran. These are candidates for President, whose foreign policy goals are as militaristic as any group of candidates in our recent history. They believe that might makes right. That the United States exceptionalism is demonstrated by establishing military hegemony over the world. That belief most clearly applies to their views on the middle east.
If Americans want to understand why voting for these Republican candidates is a poor decision for America, do not count the trillions of dollars that are spent in maintaining a military / industrial complex. Count instead, the lives of our children who get sent into these wars without directions. Think about our young men and women who are getting wounded and dying for patches of desert that have little, if any, military significance for America. Think about trying to transform countries that don't want to be transformed and losing any chance of winning the hearts and minds of the people of those countries. Think for a moment, about every person in those countries we kill and how many relatives of those people we turn into eternal haters of the American way. It is how we assist in developing fanatics, for whom death is holy if they also kill Americans.
We will win the middle east, not through war, but through education and modernization. The Republican candidates are wrong. Their position is fundamentally slapping the great majority of Americans in the face. They should go back to the old American belief that we leave our political differences at our shores. They must come aboard with a foreign policy for the 21st century, not an imperialistic policy of the early 20th.
