Who Ever Said Anything About Control?

A lament about Iraq, how the situation is uncontrollable.

NOTE: This post was written 10 days ago. I never finished it, but figured I should post it.

Well, no shit. Welcome to the world. All sorts of shit are out of our control. Whose ever tried to control the world? And they've all failed. It's too big and too complicated. Shit, it's hard to get all your friends to a birthday party, much less transform another country 180 degrees.

For the record, I agree with A LOT of what Derbyshire writes in his article. Except for one issue - we can't just whack them on the head and leave. That's what we tried in 1991 with respect to the Kuwait issue and what we did with OBL prior to 9/11.

What we can do, and what we should continue to do, is stand by those in the Middle East who prefer living under a democractic, secular modern country, as opposed to an autocratic, or fascist, or islamic fundamentalist societies. The gamble is that the majority of Iraqis prefer this way of life than the alternative, and I still think this is true. It's just been for a long time, this majority has been stifled by strong-men willing to do barbaric things to convince people otherwise. It's time we tried something else.

I've grown incredibly tired of this large group of pro-war hawks that supported the admittedly difficult choice to go to Iraq in the first place, and now come screaming back about what a poor idea it was...without any ideas about the future, other than a draw down and lowering our shoulders and admitting we were wrong and we won't do it again. Sorry if I think that's a bad idea.

I can't think of a safer position to critique from, the position that supports an admittedly risky unknown, and then when things get ugly or bad, backtracking and saying we were wrong all along (and notice, it's not really a WE, it's a George Bush and company was wrong all along, although they were amoung the chorus of supporters).

But this incessent whining about the administration negates the most important issue: we were and are in an incredibly difficult position, whereby it had become beneficial for any two bit, 3rd world politican to use anti-Americanism as a sure means towards finding popular support, especially in the Middle East. We need to counteract that balance with a credible threat, that if anyone gets too out of line, they are getting their ass kicked.

Now if there were evidence that Iraqis didn't want democracy and didn't care for our troops in the country and just wanted to go on living their own lives without our interference, I'd be the first one to say, let's roll up outta there. But that isn't what's happening. There are groups of fascists running around trying to kill Iraqis and American troops so that we'll lose our morale and leave the country, so they can claim victory and try the enslave the Iraqi masses. (Enslave is exactly what these Islamicists are after, enslaving women and shi'ia - we can't forget that, and if you're in favor of leaving it to them, you've got to be willing to admit it).

But instead, we've got the majority of Iraqis begrudgingly admitting they still need our help. And the majority of us, knowing, begrudgingly that we can't leave without victory.