Thoughts on Iraq

I responded to the a post over at Washington Monthly on the Iraq war, and found that I'd written my own little post. I plan on expanding on my thoughts more later, but here are my initial comments (typos included, so I can't be accused of trying to cover up hasty typing):


My feelings on the Iraq war are pretty complex, and they're difficult to turn into any "solution" to what all has gone wrong over there. I was 100% against the invasion, but now I find myself largely supporting our continued presence in Iraq. Posts like this one leave people who feel like I do flapping in the wind; the anti-war Left was against the invasion and is against the continued occupation, even though the rationale for our presence is completely different then the rationale for the initial invasion. I stood with those anti-war activists in 2003, but now I find many of them to be hopelessly out of touch with the world. It seems to me that many of them want our troops out, have wanted our troops out since the invasion, and the actual circumstances on the ground in Iraq are irrelevant. For others on the Left it's a political question; they are also against the war, but plans for withdrawal are more about political opportunity for Democrats or a chance to undercut Republicans in the mid-term elections. Alas, I find myself siding with the hawks on the Left; not the ones who advocated invasion to begin with, but the ones who advocate we stay in Iraq to "finish the job" as it were. I don't agree with Kevin that announcing our withdrawal will necessarily give Iraqi leaders incentive to take over their own security. The South Vietnamese government(or successive governments rather)knew which way the wind was blowing, and yet in large part could not overcome thier own internecine squabbles or gain the confidence of their own people. I know Iraq isn't Vietnam, but that example is still worth considering. Second, and more importantly for me, I see this as a moral issue as well. Iraq is the way it is because we went over there and broke it. Frankly, we owe it to them to expend far more effort then we have in putting their country back together. They deserve to have us, and our troops, over there until it becomes plainly clear that there is nothing more we can do to fix the country, as it was clear in Vietnam. Frankly it infuriates me to hear people say things like "they" need to start being responsible for their own security; they didn't ask to be invaded, so why isn't it our responsibility for as long as it takes? And to a large degree it makes me wonder if those on the Left who want a pullout are any more concerned with the average Iraq then those on the Right who wanted an invasion only because they were worried about our own security. Don't we owe the Iraqi people something? For all our bitching about lost lives and lost money, how can we compare the cost to us to the cost to them, to the cost of tens of thousands dead and a ruined country? To me it's clear; we have a duty to the Iraq people to stay in their country and battle the insurgency for as long as it takes to either defeat it, or be certain that we cannot defeat it. We have no such certainty now, regardless of the anti-war activists say. To me it would be the greatest political courage to tell the American people that we are in for a much longer and harder fight then we had anticipated, that it will be necessary to raise taxes to pay for that fight, and that it will be necessary to resume to the draft to have enough people to carry out the fight. This is the honorable thing to do, which is why no politician on the left or the right will say so.