Flada Blog

 

 Pulling Out Is Getting Popular [3:51m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

If current polls at USA Today are any indication, Americans have lost their resolve in regards to Iraq. According to the article, about half of respondents think that we should pull troops out immediately.

Over the past few years, I’ve heard this war compared to Vietnam many times, and I’ll grant that there are some similarities. Regardless of the similarities, and regardless of whether or not you thought that ousting Saddam Hussein in the first place was a good idea, we did decide to do it.

I’m not any happier than anyone else about the fact that we’ve lost over 3000 of our greatest citizens in this conflict. I get just as angrysad (that’s a word I just made up) as anyone when I hear of the thousands more who have been maimed. And unlike many of the people who blog and bitch about this, I have known people who are war casualties. For that matter, with my wife being a Navy Corpsman, she could be sent over at any time–yes, the woman I love and the mother of my 16-month-old son.

Still, I can’t help but think about the people in Phnom Penh, Cambodia who were left to the atrocities of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge when we decided to “cut and run” from Vietnam. I don’t see how anyone can look at the pictures of mountains of human remains in The Killing Fields, and not consider that if we leave Iraq now, we will most likely be leaving many Sunni to a similar fate.

I’m not okay with that.

Should we have gone in there in the first place? I don’t know. Was Saddam an immediate threat to us? I don’t know the answer to that either, was Germany an immediate threat to us prior to WWII. Arguably Japan was since they attacked Pearl Harbor prior to our official involvement. The thing is that we don’t have a time machine so it’s impossible to go back and make us “not there” regardless of what you believe now. The other thing is that President Bush didn’t act alone when we went into Iraq. Hillary, McCain, John Edwards, Kerry, and a large majority of other Representatives and Senators voted to authorize the war–representatives with the same information from the same intelligence agencies to which the President had access. They were acting on behalf of the American people who, by a wide majority, supported action in Iraq.

The bottom line is that a decision now isn’t solely about whether or not we should be in Iraq. It’s about following through on our commitments and taking care of our responsibilities. If we leave right now, we leave millions of innocent people in the hands of the same beasts who are currently killing our soldiers, Marines, and sailors. Only our people are the best trained fighting force that has ever existed in the world, so at least they have a fair chance.

Going into another country, removing their leadership, destabilizing them, leaving them open to the worst possible elements, and then pulling out when the going is getting tough while saying “let the chips fall where they may.”–I’m not cool with that!