Political post

This has been rattling around in my head for a while, so I guess it’s time to just let it out:

I think that the US military should pull out of Iraq as soon as possible. Immediate, unconditional withdrawal.

This will, of course, be followed almost immediately by the bloody collapse of the nascent government and an eruption of chaos. It is wholly likely that Iraq will split into multiple countries along ethnic lines, and that Iran will take over a large portion, in fact and/or in name.

Here’s the key to my opinion: I believe that this will happen whenever we pull out.

We could cut our losses now and watch the collapse, or we could wait a decade and then pull out and watch the collapse. It’s going to cost us around 1,000 US military lives per year, plus about $80 billion per year until we choose to leave. In addition to this, the longer we stay there, the more children are going to grow up without parents because of our actions. These children will be on both sides. We are in the process of creating a generation who will hate America / hate them foreigners because we / they killed their parents. I say we should leave now and minimize that suffering and hate.

It’s increasingly clear that the militants who are blowing themselves up to kill us do not actually seek what our government says they do. These people are infuriated by our occupation of their lands and our control of their government. They are willing to die to get us off their necks. They don’t care about our politics: all fraud, violence, and deception in our most recent elections was strictly domestic. They don’t care about Christianity: The papal conclave and succession was never at risk, so far as I can tell.

The thing that drives this murderous rage is our occupation. That’s not going to end until we leave, and the fundamental changes required to bring about democracy in that part of the world can’t be effected until the rage abates.

There is another workable solution: Total occupation and assimilation. If we were willing to go in with an order of magnitude more troops, forcibly intermarry with the population, require that English be the language of business and society, require the use of US dollars for trade, and impose strict martial law…we could successfully keep the peace. In a generation, the bitterness would be controllable. I have to admit that this makes a certain amount of sense. So long as there is one American soldier in Iraq, we’re going to be accused of this level of occupation. Actually doing it would be both more practical and more in tune with what we’re being accused of at protest marches all over the world.

This half hearted occupation is a recipe for failure, and it needs to end. I claim that it will inevitably end in failure, and that we should cut our losses as soon as possible. I don’t really give a damn about the moral right or wrong of our invasion or occupation, I just hate the needless waste of resources (both lives and dollars) that our bungling administration continues to impose.