The War

I'm not sure why I started this, ro where I'm going with it, but here it is, none the less. Life has finally become mundane, at elast for a while. I have recently found myself conflicted though. I don't support the president, I didn't vote for him in '04, and I wasn't able to put my vote towards Gore in '00. This is the first part of my conflicting thoughts.

The second, though, is that I agree with him on one point. Just one. I agree that we need to stay in Iraq for the foreseeable future. I don't agree with any of the myriad reasons put forth for the commencement of Gulf War II, but I can't see any logical reason for the US to end it at this time. You see, if we were to pull out every troop right now, we'd lose. We'd stop losing lives, even though this is the least deadly war in US history (though there is a shitload of casualties), but we'd lose the war, and a few other things. We'd lose our credibility, since if we pull out, who will trust us in the future, when we couldn't even finish what we started.

We need to stay in Iraq, no because of democracy, though that is fine and dandy, but because if we leave, the terrorists win. They gain an unstable country with millions of sympathizers, and we lose one of our few allies in the region. Sure, we're not going about this the smartest way, but we can't just leave, it would cascade into another isolationist movement like we had after WWI, and that lead to WWII, because we refused to join in. This is a worse case scenario, the best case is just a mild PR nightmare, and the Iraqi people banding together to form a strong and liberal Muslim democracy.

So, we need to stay, and we need to help support the Iraqi citizens. We need to get the Iraqis defending themselves, and to see the terrorists for exactly what they are, homicidal maniacs that don't want to see a free and democratic Iraq. Sure, we put Saddam in power, but he was the lesser of two evils, and then he became the greater evil, but we left him in power after GWI because of politics. If we can't support an Iraqi coalition government, then he might become, once more, the lesser evil. That would be a sad day for America.

So, I hate to admit it, but I agree with President Bush, we need to stay the course in Iraq, because the alternative is worse.