Failure Is Not An Option: Part 2
President Bush, in his latest press conference, said, “The American people have got to understand the consequence of leaving Iraq.” I think he’s right. Before we can genuinely call for our troops to leave Iraq, we have to know what the end result of that process will look like. We have to know what failure means.
According to the President, failure in Iraq is…:
- A civil war between Sunnis and Shi’ites
- Innocent civilians living their lives in fear
- The creation of “a safe-haven for terrorists”
- A message to reformers in the Middle East that the US has “abandoned our desire to change the conditions that create terror.”
- The first domino
- The creation of a more dangerous world
- Chaos in the region
- Telling our troops that they sacrificed for nothing
- A failure to secure our own country
- A sign that “we will have lost our soul as a nation”
Yesterday we looked at his first description of failure. Today, we look at his second description.
Failure in Iraq is innocent civilians living their lives in fear.
In the TIME article I referenced yesterday, Life in Hell: A Baghdad Diary,” Aparisim Gosh writes, “For Iraqis, reality is not just a suicide bomber but an accumulation of daily dangers and the growing certainty that things are about to get much worse…Powerless to stop the killing, al-Maliki’s government has also failed to improve the lot of the living. Crime continues to soar, especially the booming business of kidnapping for ransom. U.S. officials say as many as 40 Iraqis are kidnapped every day….Almost every Sunni family I meet seems to have a horror story that starts with a policeman at a checkpoint asking for identitification…I fear the sectarian furies that have been unleashed in Iraq will now hack away at the last vestiges of sense and decency and drag the country into a final fight to the death.”
According to the New York Times, more Iraqis died in July than in any other month of the war: “An average of more than 110 Iraqis were killed each day in July, according to the figures. The total number of civilian deaths that month, 3,438, is a 9 percent increase over the tally in June and nearly double the toll in January.”
In Philadelphia, the American Friends Service Committee staged a photo exhibition entitled, “Dreams and Nightmares: Daily Life in Iraq.” The Philadelphia Inquirer reports, “The pictures of Iraqis going about their daily routines were made by Philadelphia photographer Linda Panetta, who visited Iraq in 2003 and 2004. In a year, she said, the war’s toll on civilians was clear. ‘You could see the immense fear in people’s eyes,’ she said. ‘You just never knew what was coming around the corner.’”
And as the massacre at Haditha and the rape and murder of Abeer Qassim al-Janabi and her family revealed, Iraqis don’t just fear each other, but have every reason to fear the U.S. soldiers too.
If failure is innocent civilians living in fear, then we have already failed.
Come back tomorrow to read “Failure Is Not An Option: Part 3.”