If Anything Is Worth Fighting For

Spoke with my mom this weekend who brought up the subject of Iraq. She was always strongly against the war, even when most Democratic politicians were supporting it. But she believes a pullout right now would be stupid. "You don't fight a war on a timetable."

And it got me to revisit and rethink what we're doing there and in the Middle East in general. We're fighting against remnants of a Fascist, Nationalistic, Tribal regime and Sunni Jihadists. Sometimes we are in danger of fighting Shiia Islamicists with ideological ties to Iran.

All of these groups suck. The only reason they don't suck as much as the Nazis or Khmer Rouge is because they've never been powerful enough. They've always had counterweights in the region (including each other).

I get a sense many Americans are ashamed of this war. Ashamed that we got into it and ashamed we aren't winning it. But I don't see why we should be ashamed of fighting these enemies. None of them are partners of peace. Any peace with such groups is temporary, at best, and capitulation and weakness, at worst. So it turns out to be tougher than we thought. Well, so what? Does that mean it is wrong?

I hate to belittle the sacrifices made by Americans both in lives and wallets, but at the same time, the costs are minor compared to other large conflicts. I think the political class has done a poor job of explaining to the American people why this war is necessary and elevating the passion of the people to stay in and fight it for the long haul. They've failed to explain what kind of sacrifices will need to be made and why, and failed to gain popular support. I think a lot of this has to do with the partisanship that seems to have grown out of control and we don't have wise enough leaders to overcome the systemic problems.

But I'm also tired of American citizens who think there wasn't enough debate and keep wanting to Monday morning QB the entire thing. There was more debate about Iraq than any other event in my lifetime and yet you hear people on TV saying we needed to debate more. What they mean is they lost the debate. And then Americans who simply want to criticise the political class without knowing what they are talking about or the stakes of the conflict. They want wise leaders, but all they watch is cable news punditry and derive their opinions from the stupid sound bite culture they sometimes wrestle the energy to criticise.

We think narrowly about Iraq as if we could just get out of there, the world would return to the status quo. But what we don't want to acknowledge is that status quo we seem to think so highly of, was one where anti-Americanism was reaching fever-pitch status in the Middle East, combined with a ruthless new actor on the world stage - Al Queda, multiple rouge states seeking incredibly powerful weaponry, the CIA doing a horrible job of stopping Islamic terror organizations, and not to mention the creation of another lost generation of Arab-Muslims living in a quagmire of self pity and hatred in thuggish police states.

American students read 1984 and are horrified. We see it as a metaphor for our own political and capitalistic culture. We use it a warning to ourselves of what we could become. Yet, there are states and places in the world where it is truly 1984ish - not some gloomy fairytale of warning - but a true state of existence where other human being live in a mixture of terror and passivity. Afghanistan and Iraq were two of those places and to go in and try to fight against such tyranny seems to me not something to be ashamed of at all. In fact, the shame should come from living with freedoms handed to us and not be willing to sacrfice so that others may have the same.