The Simple Truth of Iraq
There’s been a lot of talk over the last couple of days/weeks about the need for more troops in Iraq. Senators McCain and Lieberman are urging it; Democratic Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, will support it if the President calls for it; the Joint Chiefs, Colin Powell, and three-out-of-four Americans are against it; and the President is toeing some middle ground at the moment. All of this begs the question: Why the hell would we send more troops to Iraq?
What I don’t get is why people who are supposed to be experts in this kind of stuff think that it is possible to win a war against a shadow enemy without the wholesale destruction of the Iraqi population. I mean, don’t they get that there is no way, short of using nukes, to insure that all the bad guys are gone? The reality on the ground is that the enemy looks just like, dresses just like, talks just like, walks just like, prays just like, and lives just like innocent civilians. There is no way to defeat them that does not, at the same time, irrevocably harm the innocent.
In short, there is no moral way to win this war.
So the real question is this: Are we a moral people? The simple truth that we’ve learned from Iraq is that we are not. We have learned that we, as a country comprised solely of “the people”, are willing to give up our morals if they get in the way of “winning.” We are willing to torture. We are willing to rob people of their natural rights. And we are willing to destroy an entire country, to kill its citizens and confine any survivors in a cage of chaos and primal fear, for the simple reason that we are unwilling to “lose.”
This should not come as a surprise. In a country where the leading sources of entertainment involve watching individuals doing whatever they have to do to win, where our leaders are expected to do whatever it takes to get elected, where box office takes, nightly ratings, bestseller lists, and Billboard standings determine “artistic success” — in a country where winning is everything, it would only make sense that morality has no place in the discussion.
For argument’s sake, however, let’s say that we, as a country, decided that victory wasn’t worth it, that we pride ourselves not on just saying we’re the best country in the world, but that we pride ourselves on the fact that we strive to be the best country in the world. And let’s say that we, as a country, decide to redefine out notion of what it means to be the best, that we decide “being the best” no longer means “living with the most luxuries,” that it now means “striving to do what’s right, to do what’s good, at all times.” Let’s say that we, as a country, as a people, let’s say that we decide all that.
The question then becomes: what is the moral thing to do re: Iraq?