With all the current controversy with everything that's going on in Iraq, it's just highlighted to me how complacent and "spoiled" we've become.
Let me state for the record that I view the Iraq War as doing the right thing for the wrong reason. Yes, Saddam had to be removed. The guy was just plain evil. He tortured and killed for no reason other than to keep hold of his own power.
In other words, Oil was the reason, Saddam and WMD's were the excuse. So we went into Iraq, freed the people from a dictator, and brought those responsible for the millions of Human Rights Violations to justice.
Then the whole country turned into a nation of Monday Morning Quarterbacks. This should have been done, this shouldn't have been done and this should have been done better.
But now I want you all to think of something.
Imagine we never went to Iraq. Imagine that Saddam is still in power. He's still doing whatever the hell he likes, completely ignoring international law, the United Nations...then hiding behind the same system he's flouting when he needs to.
What would the country be like then?
I'll tell you. Everyone would be on TV complaining just as hard as they are now that Saddam's gone and gassed another bunch of kids in Iran, that he may have nuclear weapons...and despite the fact he's violating treaties by refusing to allow weapons inspectors into the country, or letting them in and not letting them inspect certain sites...That nothing's being done about it.
That's the part everyone seems to have forgotten. Saddam refused to let weapons inspectors into Iraq. Why would he if he had nothing to hide? Then he let them in, but made certain areas off limits.
Think about that. Imagine if you thought your kid had drugs hidden in their room. First they refuse to let you search. Then they say "Ok, you can search, but you're not allowed to look under the bed or in any of the dresser drawers."
What would be the point in looking? What would you do?
The whole thing reminds me of a speech made by Tony Blair (The British Prime Minister), before he was elected. I'll paraphrase, but it went something like this:
"People want a better school system, improvements to the National Health Service, more police on the beat etc, etc, but at the same time they want fewer taxes. These things have to be paid for. You can have improvements to the country or lower taxes...but not both."
In other words we go to Iraq and everyone complains, when (at least in my opinion), if we hadn't, we'd be complaining just as hard.
3 comments:
I'm with you on this 110%, and to be honest - i'm just about fucked off with do gooders who proclaim war is wrong without anything thought to how much worse the alternative could have been.
Ok rant over.
Right thing for the wrong reasons, agreed.
The problem is, there's no such thing as winning a war in the Middle East - they've been fighting each other for thousands of years, and that's not going to stop. Either we maintain an occupying presence forever, or we withdraw and it goes back to the way it was.
My opposition to our involvement in Iraq was and is a matter of logistics. We went into Afghanistan first, a country that has historically proven time and time again to be unbeatable. Afghanistan was the Soviet Union's version of Vietnam.
I was all for going in there, but we had to focus on Afghanistan until the job was done right. Bush fucked up by opening up a second front in our war on terror... two-front wars cannot be won. If we had finished Afghanistan and then gone in to Iraq, that would have been different.
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