With Concern,
Alexander

http://greensrealworld.blogspot.com/2009/01/war-in-iraq-lest-we-forget.html

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB82/

“This is a future where Iraq’s billions are used in transparent contracts to build the country and improve economic ties with our true allies and friends, not in shady deals for building palaces, supporting terrorists, and procuring tools of aggression.”

and yet over 100 billion has been lost to corruption, some of it U.S. taxpayer dollars.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/14/world/middleeast/14reconstruct.html

You mentioned the Christian festival, and yet in October, 3000 Christians fled Mosul.

http://www.christiansofiraq.com/houses%20blownup.html

But yes, it’s nice that Iraq is not a threat to its neighbors, if it is true. The U.S. does not get a permanent military base there, as was hoped by Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld and other neocons; nor is there a Saddam to keep Iran in check. Mission accomplished!

Aakash: Your position may be a soundly reasoned on philosophical grounds, with excellent footnotes and annotations (did you major in English? Poli-Sci?), but your well-meaning reasoning completely ignores the reality of the post 9/11 world. If George Bush had played his cards slightly differently, we would not have stopped at Iraq, but would have steamrollered the entire pack of animals in the ME – Syria, Iran, hell even Saudi Arabia would have been boxing up their Wahabi crazies. The US was completely ENRAGED after 9/11, sick to death of Islamists ever since the Iranian hostage crisis. The “Death to America” crowd was going to get some smackdown no matter what. Bush picked the next-biggest immediate, proven threat on the table after the Taliban-protected AQI’s were toppled and OIF was born. Like many other wars we have ever fought to a true completion (i.e. NOT the 1991 Gulf War), it was messier and more difficult than we hoped, and we can still “lose the peace”, just like we did in Viet Nam. The winner of the combat phase in Iraq has been decided. The winner of the peace will take much longer. We are in the same situation as we were in 1945. The question is, will we consolidate the gains made or squander them. Does your textbook conservatism lead you to think WWII was a mistake too?

I was in High School during the “America Held Hostage” days, was a BIG Reagan supporter and have worked in the Defense Industry most of my career. I thought many of Bill Clinton’s interventions abroad were stupid precisely because they weren’t in our vital interests (e.g. Somalia, Haiti, etc.), while those that were (Iraq, Al Queda terrorism) were ignored. It is impossible to argue that a stable, democratic Iraq is not a huge boon to US and Western interests (to say nothing of the Iraqi’s interests). Sometimes the rigorous logic leads you to the wrong place.

Brothers, I remember the sacrifices, including your own loss. I remember the discovery of the mass graves from the Saddam Hussein era, and the targeting of responsible adults in all walks of life, first by Hussein and then by Al-Qaeda: clerics, sheiks, members of Parliament, judges lawyers, doctors, school teachers (in the classroom, in front of the children), and even old people, volunteers for police and IA jobs, and children, including the wiring of a girls’ school that was discovered and thereby prevented.

Then, there was the evidence of, not just killing, but savagery: cutting off people’s fingers for smoking, corpses with holes drilled in their joints, cutting and burning and wounding designed for no reason than to cause pain or desecrate the bodies of the slain.

I remember the use of the body of a murdered baby as a booby-trap for its parents.

I remember the use of people whose families had been threatened, drivers of cars who did not know the plan, girls of limited intelligence, and animals as “suicide” bombers.

And I remember the responses: The people who came out to vote, and dip their fingers in purple ink, the people who went to work, anyway; the engineers who just kept rebuilding; the ordinary people who built tangles of wires to keep their fans and lights running, the mother who cried out “If my son dies, I will drink Zarqawi’s blood!”

The cleric who asked other clerics to declare the terrorist writings outside the law of Islam, and said “treat the Sunnis like your family;” the politicians who said “One Iraq, for all Iraqis,” and who made the point of including Christians and Jews among them; the vow to rebuild the Golden Dome; the prominent local Muslims who came to church when it was reopened, and asked to be photographed there, to tell their neighbors that it is ok to come back home;

the American officer clutching the bloodied body of a four-year old girl in a vain attempt to save her life, the tears from the big guys with the guns, when they discovered some starveling orphans; and the people who asked for cigarettes to smoke when Al-Qaeda was thrown out of their area.

the Kurd who wrote you saying that “you are welcome to come live here.” The General who surveyed what was working, and came up with a plan to win the peace by, of all things, respecting the adults responsible for the welfare of local Iraqis.

No sacrifices, indeed. The sacrifices in Iraq have been enormous, as have the responses: a display of human courage, tenacity, will, generosity, creativity, faith, hope and love.

God Bless Iraq. God Bless the USA. Heaven help us all.

I didn’t mention this in my prior post, but I have said before that the philosophy behind the Iraq war is in fact, un-American.

Socialism does not work, whether the federal government attempts it within our borders (the Bush administration has certainly helped on that accord as well), or outside our borders.

As I said to Rich Lowry at the 2004 National Conservative Student Conference, it is true that the great President Ronald Reagan believed in exporting American values abroad – the difference however, between the foreign policy vision of Ronald Reagan & George H.W. Bush (which was grounded in realism) vs. the foreign policy philosophies of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush (which is in line with liberal internationalism – something which George W. Bush campaigned against when he was first elected, but then chose to embrace – as Pajamas Media co-founder Michael Totten pointed out, the year the Iraq war began)… The difference between those visions is the means by which U.S. values are spread, to other nations.

Former President George Herbert Walker Bush has never supported the Iraq war, and virtually all of the top foreign-policy officials from his administration have been against those policies as well, along with many key members of the Reagan administration. Ronald Reagan believed in peace through strength, not through war, and would not have gone to war with Iraq.

But what is most significant is how the leftist utopian / Wilsonian vision behind this war is very different from the wisdom and advice of our Founding Fathers. It is contrary to the principles of traditional conservatism and constitutionalism, and to the principles of republican liberty upon which our great nation was founded.