Sorry for the long hiatus, folks. Work gets in the way of what I really want to do and to be honest, I've been a tad apathetic recently towards politics. I'm a bit scandaled out, if you know what I'm saying.
Nonetheless, if there is one issue that will bring me out of the woodwork, it is the war issue. As it stands, somehow it seems we are now poised to enter into Iraq War 2.0 (or 3.0 if we go all the way back to the 90s). Why can we not just leave this country alone? What is so dang important over there that we've dedicated two and a half decades, over $2 trillion dollars, thousands of American lives, and over a million dead or displaced Iraqis, 500,000 of whom were children under the age of 5 that, we cannot remind you too often, Madeleine Albright once so cavalierly proclaimed were "worth it"?
Jon Stewart on The Daily Show did an epic segment highlighting just how wrong Dick Cheney and his ilk have been on this whole Iraq situation. I hardly pay any attention to The Daily Show anymore but he nails it in this piece, "Now That's What I Call Being Completely F*cking Wrong About Iraq!"
What gives me a glimmer of hope now is how many right wing commentators who previously supported the Iraq war as sold to us in the Bush years are now calling Cheney and his cronies out for being wrong about Iraq. They recognize the war as a folly and realize that despite our supposed good intentions, the cost is too great. Megyn Kelly of Fox News took Dick Cheney to task for his role of promoting the Iraq War admonishing him that "...time and time again history has proven that you got it wrong in Iraq as well, sir".
Glenn Beck has also come out in opposition of the Iraq war. In a lengthy monologue on his radio show, Beck had this to say:
Now, in spite of the things I felt at the time when we went into war, liberals said: We shouldn’t get involved. We shouldn’t nation-build. And there was no indication the people of Iraq had the will to be free. I thought that was insulting at the time. Everybody wants to be free. They said we couldn’t force freedom on people. Let me lead with my mistakes. You are right. Liberals, you were right. We shouldn’t have.
Now, if you believed those things, let me say: You were right. If you were just using it for political purposes, well, we don’t have anything in common, But if you really believe those things, I would like to have a conversation with you now to find out exactly how you came to terms with that – especially being a progressive. If you know the history of the progressive movement, it was Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson that started imposing democracy in South America. The reason why South America is just loaded with communists is because we put a lot of them in. That’s the progressive ideal.
But I agree with you: You cannot force democracy on the Iraqis or anybody else. It doesn’t work. They don’t understand it or even really want it. They may be too immersed in their own belief of Sharia Law to embrace liberty or at least at this time. If people vote for Sharia Law, they vote for Sharia Law. We tried. What can we do? We have lost thousands of American lives. We have lost thousands of lives on the Iraqi side and tens of thousands have been wounded. We have spent $2 trillion – say that again – $2 trillion, and upwards of 200,000 Iraqi citizens, aid workers, insurgents have been killed. That’s the conservative number. Liberals will tell you it’s almost 1 million people. I don’t know what the number is, but after all of that, hundreds of thousands of lives, $2 trillion, the best minds in the world trying to do it, it’s about to fall apart...
But, anyway, all of that is gone. And yet, this is something I think that we can come together with, on the right and the left. And it’s this – I have more of a chance of hacking off my loyal listeners and audience by saying this, but so be it: Not one more life. Not one more life. Not one more dollar, not one more airplane, not one more bullet, not one more Marine, not one more arm or leg or eye. Not one more.
The people of Iraq have got to work this out themselves. Our days of being the world’s policemen, our days of interventionists is over. If we are directly attacked, so be it. But this must end now.
Bam! What a change of tune from the Glenn Beck of old. The cherry on top, however, is the conservative standard himself, Ronald Reagan's son, Michael, coming out and apologizing for his support of the Iraq war in the early days, “As a conservative who supported the war in Iraq and my president, I apologize to all of the families of those killed or wounded in Iraq. Going to war in Iraq seemed so right at the time. But I didn’t think it through and neither did Washington. Next time, I promise I’ll know better.”
So what's wrong with the rest of the world? I've had many conversations with people who still don't see what the hubabaloo is, who don't believe that the Bush/Cheney administration lied, who believe that there were WMDs but that they were moved to Syria or we just didn't have enough time to find them, that Iraq was harboring terrorists, that they were training al-Qaeda, and pretty much every other lie trotted out to sell us the Iraq war.
Let me tell you something, even as a young, naive 20 year old college student I could see through the bullshit a mile away. When your president can't give you one good reason and instead has to sell you on 4 mediocre (read: BS) ones, that's not a good enough reason to waste lives or money to go to war. Clearly that does not represent an imminent threat.
Will we make the same mistake again by further immersing ourselves in a region that has been in conflict for a millennium? Do we have the hubris to believe that we can swoop in and magically solve a problem that they haven't been able to solve themselves in almost their entire history? Does "finishing the job" mean we leave troops there always and forever until there is peace in the Middle East, even if that doesn't look likely within this century? Does any of this have anything to do with national security or is it just in our national interests (they are not one and the same)?
