There is a great deal about the War in Iraq I’ve detested. The way our country was mislead into taking action with tainted intelligence (which includes myself); the way the President and his staff railroaded their war against Saddam through congress; the way we flat out bypassed the UN and took the burden of being a liberator squarely on our own shoulders and against the will of many in the world. These are all black eyes that the Bush administration, not to mention the United States itself, will have a long hard road recovering from, if they ever can fully recover.
With all of that said, we still do have to remember that Saddam was indeed a malicious dictator who abused his people and his power. The people of Iraq, while going through a tumultuous change now filled with uncertainties, are better off without him. Don’t believe me? Try reading this excellent first hand account of the rebirth of Iraq and telling me that. Example:
Yet, Yasser admits: “The first fortnight, I was really, really depressed. Everyone in Iraq had been totally conditioned to wait to be told what to do by the state. Anybody with initiative got tortured or killed by Saddam, so people just waited for orders. So even after the liberation, they couldn’t understand that they were free; they didn’t know what it meant. But then I saw that gradually they were realising, and that day by day they were sort of defrosting.”
As for the immediate future of Iraq, our collective hands are going to have to stay intwined in it. Calls from both the left and the right now speak of distancing our nation from the mess we’ve made, strengthen by the way the mass media presents us with pictures and accounts of bombings and sound bites of Anti-American rallies from the Iraqis themselves. However, that would be a short sighted solution that would harm everyone all around:
There is a terrible fear among many Iraqis that they will not be able to match the Kurds’ achievement if they are abandoned by the Americans once again. “The memories of 1991 are so vivid,” says Sama. “People still fear that somehow the Americans will abandon us and Saddam will claw his way back from the grave. They say, `It happened in 1991, it could happen again.’ That’s one crucial reason why people are reluctant to cooperate with the coalition.” She adds: “I find it absolutely incredible that the anti-war people are now calling for the coalition to leave straight away. Nobody in Iraq wants that. The opinion polls show it’s just 13 per cent. Don’t they care about the Iraqi people and what they want at all? This isn’t a game. This isn’t about poking a stick at George Bush. This is our lives.”
Like it or not, we’re in this for the long haul. Bypassing the UN on our decision to make war is now going to bite us in the ass during our attempts to cultivate peace, as shown in the cool reaction to G.W. Bush’s most recent address to the Generally Assembly. It’s going to take saying “I’m sorry” and the willingness to give away a great deal of control in the process of rebuilding Iraq to the masses to even begin to fix America’s shattered image, but it seems as thought out current commander in chief refuses to see the obvious.
Regardless of who sits in the oval office after the 2004 election, they are going to have to deal with the Iraq situation well into their term because to abandon the people we liberated from oppression would be just as bad, if not worse, than the call to war itself. A mess was made on our behalf and we have to make sure it gets cleaned up.
Of course, in my opinion part of the cleaning begins with wiping the current administration from the White House.
