I can barely remember life prior to American involvement in Iraq. And yet, the war continues to be the most prevalent news generator (and rightly so). The war has been taxing on our manpower and, for many, disturbing to our impression of the government.
Reading Dima's post, I found many of the same Iraq related opinions and issues that I have observed in the United States. It seems that the constant war images that invade our news and entertainment are numbing to many and scalding to others. The jury on our success in Iraq is still out, but I'm not sure that Bush will ever be considered the country's ultimate liberator. That task will fall within the next administration's realm. The "spectacle" of the toppling of Saddam's statue was certainly filled with media hype and was primarily symbolic. It will be the political and diplomatic moves that create great change.
Jeff Huber points to the unknown of our timeline for troop involvement in the country. The reality that we are only now working on setting up a hard schedule for pulling out our troops is disturbing. How long have we been in Iraq without a plan? I understand that we can't just harshly remove ourselves, but we need to at least have a plan to prevent what appears to be our present "blank check" situation.
Of course, troops are still needed. Violence persists as fighting amongst religious groups continues as explained by Healing Iraq both in photos and in posts. How can we pull out troops when such hideous acts as honor killings and their subsequent retaliations persist. Is this our cultural war to fight? Leaving such an act free to occur should eliminate the clean conscious of our government and provide reason for involvement focused on stability progress.
About Me
- Scott
- Troy, New York, United States
- I'm a mechanical engineering student exploring the indoors and outdoors. But mostly the outdoors.
5 comments:
Interesting Comments. I can remember having the same feelings about the Vietnam war and the news coverage at that time.
As far as your comment on a timeline,its interesting to remember that we entered this conflict without an exit plan. We now know for sure that that is not a very successful strategy.
As much as it might anger many people, I would actually have to agree with the President when it comes to the timeline. I do feel like it would indeed just be "a date on the terrorists' calendar" if we set a date to pull out of Iraq. This is something that should have been thought of a long time ago though. I cannot really see a way to wage a war such as this where the result did not end up being the blank check to which you refer. How can we really go in and destroy a government, set up elections that are widely protested, and then just say to the unpopular leaders, "Ok, go." Maybe there are politicians who are much more creative than me in that respect, but it does not seem logical to expect more of a definitive timeline than what we had (ie setting up the elections). At this point I still do not see a point in the future where we will be able to say that our work is done. Previously, I would have said that the cultural war that you mentioned is not much of our business. But now that we have destroyed the infrastructure of the country as a whole, I feel like it has become our responsibility to clean up our mess as all of the countries who would not participate in the war look on and say their "I told you so."
It's interesting comments on the timeline. I too agree a timeline is a bad idea. However I think we have been going about this war with a wrong outlook. We should have overthrown the Iraq government, found Saddam, leave iraq, let the country restablize then move back in and work with the new government in shapping in the way we want. This I would have been in my opinion a better way to do things.
Eric J.
I think we have already lost in Iraq. The people in the US, as well as elected representatives, are not supportive. If the government of Iraq declared "we've won", would the poeple of the US feel any different; I don't think so. We are essentially in the middle of an age-old religious war in which we don't know the culture or the religion. It seems we are working to "stabilize" a country / region that has not been stable for centuries. We try to apply Western thinking and rationale to situations where the people have fundamentally different views. In the meantime, our military forces are stuck between two factions who are intent in destroying each other and don't mind attacking the military force in the middle. Sometimes it seems like a more natural course would be to exit, and let the internal fighting go on. This is not to denigrate the work done by the outside military forces in Iraq; they are working hard at restoring order, providing infrastructure, etc. They are following orders in what was an ill-considered plan. Unfortunately, as a soldier the job is sometimes to "be in harm's way". The "win" in Iraq is not clear; I believe at best it can only be temporary. It is clear that religius factions will fight each other in the region for many more years.
Hello there,
interesting post and blog.
well, it's a very hard decision for the US administration to make.
The US can't simply pull out of Iraq but it's not really a war between the Iraqi's and the Americans now , its moree like a civil war. The Iraqi's must take the lead and they are the only ones who can restablize Iraq but the Americans still can''t pull out after they invaded Iraq and overthrew the govt.
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