Iraq: My Two Cents (and some Canadian coins I've been trying to get rid of)

...Some theory here, some fact, and some feelings… all is a bit unrefined...I would ask that either you read-it-through, or just not bother at all, I'm not going to dignify Wikipedia defenses, or HuffPo article references with an answer (well, a nice or polite one anyway) =D



What Exactly is it That You Hate About Iraq?

I’ll start this by saying that I do not share the popular view that it is a badly run war or that it is / was a mistake… What is the example of a well-run war that wasn’t done to conquer? I believe it is a noble and necessary fight that we are fighting because someone had to, and historically we are usually that somebody (which I for one am proud to say)….
So here are some thoughts, some we could argue until morning (they are obviously loose theory I think), and some that you could not convince me of without getting me high, drunk, and laid by Wonder Woman first…

Is it that there were no WMD’s?

Well according to the Geneva Convention mustard gas is a WMD (which was an inspiration for the term in the first place), just not the ones you were hoping for. They have collected hundreds of mustard gas shells so far and exhumed bodies of countless whole families who had been gassed in Iraq over the years… To hell with why they were there, or attempted equivocations, the fact is that they were there…

But of course you want juicy nukes and plagues; they are way sexier than silly old gasses and chances are you'll allow yourself to redefine WMD's to suit this desire... Not much anyone can do about that if you want to...

During the weeks leading up to the actual invasion there were numerous reports of large amounts of suspicious equipment being rushed over the border to Syria (which was Iraq’s Baath ‘sister state’, and in fact many in that region felt were the same country, as it was the west that divided them up in-the-first-place). Do you not find it a bit odd that Syria then mysteriously comes up with a nuclear weapons program that was almost entirely unknown until Israel bombed it? Are you excluding even the possibility there? ...Why so?

So far as biological weapons (because mustard gas may not be 'biological' enough for you); we had a nationwide anthrax killing spree in our country directly following 9/11; A structured, wide-spread attack...

Seven years later with all the track-able evidence in the world, we cannot find the actual source of that anthrax in the United States with unlimited resources. It could be produced and maintained 2 miles from the police station and we wouldn’t have found it, so how can any human being honestly say there was none in Iraq? It could be in a shoe in a closet in Baghdad fifty feet from the ‘green zone’ right now, and no one would know it…

I'm not saying that they were there, I am however saying you've got to be skewed against reality to insist that they were never there... And frankly I think Mossad, British intelligence, the former KGB, and almost every intelligence apparatus in the world are a bit more knowledgable than 'Code Pink', that even our own government now says otherwise is a political appeasment, because in the end, with the same intelligence, we'd be right to do it again, and idiots not to...

Is it that it’s an Endless War™ or an ‘Occupation’?

2003 – 2008 is less time than we spent enforcing the 'No Fly Zone' in the 1990’s UN centered operations, yet in 2003 it was already being labeled a ‘quagmire’ by John Kerry after only a few weeks. In fact before the fall of Baghdad occured...

I hear that ‘it’s taken longer than WWII' used as an example. Well, That’s because everyone leveled entire cities and A-Bombed places without regard for the people in WWII; we did it because we had virtually no choice at the time, now we do, should we do that in Iraq as well to speed-it-up? Is that what you want, just level the place indiscriminately so we don't have to be there too long? …Really? Have you considered the amounts of dead innocents in something like that?

Since we are mentioning WWII; how about those occupations? You think four years is a long occupation? How about our still active occupations of Germany, Italy, Korea and Japan to name a few? Occupations have helped the chaos like the post World War I world from happening again; they are nations choosing to help other nations to a place where they can stand on their own without becoming the wreck that post WWI Germany was, and without taking them over. Hitler’s rise to power was born in a post war country with no hope that had been punished into oblivion by its neighbors; had we occupied it, it probably would not have happened, we don’t want that again do we?

Is it the 4000 dead US soldiers?

In Vietnam 10 years of war yielded 50 – 60,000 U.S. dead. It is horrendous, and horrible by any standard. 5,000+ dead American’s a year if you average it out. Good people, liberators, kids with little choice, who went in and paid horribly for the belief that freeing people from tyranny is a noble cause, the noblest cause in fact.

When this horror became too much to handle for a certain loud cross-section of our country, and the price deemed too steep, we simply up-and-left. We were overwhelmed with political permutations of peace and love instead of war, so we just left…

Three million poets, doctors, writers, philosophers, artists, scientists, teachers, musicians, lawyers, activists, dreamers, lovers, children, and mothers were slaughtered for being the wrong kind of people when our influence and strength and sacrifice left that area… three million lives were snuffed out in an unimaginable river of blood to satisfy people to whom the major complaint was a lack of peace in a war in which the US never lost a single major battle…

If you are telling me that three million dead innocent people don’t count because they weren’t us, then I don’t know what to tell you about your view on the value of human life…

I work frequently with the military, I have seen the effects and tragedies from Iraq, and yet cannot fathom the loss of those 4000+ families, and friends, and lovers. I don’t pretend to know how badly that hurts; I’d be a fool to attempt it…

America’s military has the unique distinction of being the only major military ever that has spent almost all of its fighting ability, history, and capacity to liberate others at times when it was doing just fine for itself.

Not to expand its empire, not to rape, plunder, and pillage, not to oppress classes of people, not for money… We liberate, and that is what makes our pride in our military different than anything that has ever come before it in the entire history of the human being…

In Iraq twenty-five million people were oppressed in tyranny, treated as cattle, and property of a state to be disposed of in whatever fitting way that a handful of madmen chose.

Those 4000 people died in the name of the single best hope there has ever been on Earth for a free humanity, they have done more for civil rights, women’s rights, religious freedom, and the general progress of mankind than you have or I have, or likely ever will… Many did so before they were old enough to drink a beer legally...

Twenty five million people trying to figure for the first time out just what the hell “free” is… That is beautiful beyond words…

As a captain in the US Navy told me only a few days ago: “No one hates war more than a soldier…” I believe it…If you don't then maybe it's time for you to think about it, or better yet, enlist...

You can say it’s about oil, but you’re wrong, and it's provable, you can say it’s revenge, and you are wrong again, and you know it...

You can say that it is needless and not worth it, and I would say to you that unless you misunderstand what humanity is, twenty-five million poets, writers, actors, scientists, musicians, teachers, farmers, ditch diggers, cooks, truck drivers, nurses, and ‘undecideds’ is *always* worth it…

Always...

It's my opinion, take it or leave it...