My 3 ½ cents worth on the Iraq war
I think that there is a bigger picture that most people don’t see. The war is not about weapons of mass destruction and it’s not about oil. It’s about the war on terrorism. The US has declared war on terrorism and vowed to go after all terrorist organizations with a global reach and the regimes that support them. Iraq is just next on the list.
The US is actually approaching the war very intelligently. They know that to fight terrorism, you don’t swat the mosquitoes, you drain the swamp. That is exactly what they’re doing, draining the swamp. They are going to transform the entire Middle East.
You look at the Middle East in general; most of those countries are shit holes. They’re terrible countries to live. The people are repressed, beat down by extreme poverty and there is high illiteracy. They’re mostly run by these brutal tyrants who are skimming money off of the country to put in their own Swiss bank accounts and foreign investments while the people starve. Most importantly, there is no hope that things will ever get better. They just seem to get worse and worse. This is why they become suicide bombers because they have nothing to loose. It’s hard for us living in the west to understand what would drive someone to blowing themselves up just to take a few of the “enemy” with them but you have to understand that we live a relatively good life compared to them.
These people are frustrated more than we can comprehend. Their frustration turns into anger and their anger turns into hate. The corrupt leaders actually encourage the people to focus their hate on the outsiders such as the Christians, the Jews, the Americans and so forth because it takes the heat off of them. They say to the people, “It’s not our fault that you’re poor and repressed. It’s the Americans. Look at how rich and free they are. It’s their fault, not ours.”
Along comes a guy like Osama Bin Ladin who organizes them, funds them and channels their hatred. September 11th was an act of hatred. There will be more unless the US does something about it.
What the people in the Middle East need more importantly than anything else is hope for a better future. In order to do that, the world needs to go into those countries, get rid of the tyrant, put in some decent government that is more representative of the people. Next, go in and feed them, setup the infrastructure. Build hospitals, schools, universities, factories, shops, community centers and all the other things that can bring about an improvement in the quality of life. This is what the US is going to do in Iraq.
This is a huge, expensive undertaking. There will be huge dollars spent. There will also be body bags. It will be messy. We can’t expect it to go smoothly. There will be setbacks but they have to do it. The alternative is to wait for another September 11th because it will come eventually if they do nothing.
You might think that this is fairy tale and that it can’t happen. It’s not a fairy tale, it’s happened before in history. It’s exactly what the US did in Germany and Japan after WWII. The US spent billions building both those countries back up again after they bombed them. They set up democracies and got the counties working again. Today, both Germany and Japan are prosperous counties with thriving democracies. Most importantly, they are allies to the US.
Iraq has potential to be a descent country with the right leadership. The Iraqi people are fairly well educated, modern and westernized. They are a Muslim country but they’re not run by Islamic law like a country like Iran. They are also very wealthy. If the US can set up a thriving, prosperous democracy in the Middle East, it will have a profound ripple effect on the rest of the region. It will be hard for those other tyrants to justify their brutality with a prosperous, free, Iraq next door.
This is a VERY gutsy move for the US to do. It’s also arrogant to just go into another country and change the leadership because you don’t like them. Does the US have the moral authority to go into Iraq? That’s a difficult question to answer. This is what most of the debate is about. In my opinion, the US hasn’t been truly honest with their motivation. They are justifying it with the WMD argument. This is why a lot of people have a problem with the war. Is this war the right thing to do? Absolutely.
