In light of personally finding about two dozen of the little green soldiers last Wednesday, I'm reminded of some unpleasant truths. I'm sure a lot of readers will not like what I'm about to say, but it needs to be said.
Bear with me and think about the people who planned the Iraq invasion. All of the promises about weapons, being greeted as liberators and then later disbanding the Iraqi army and not properly sealing Iraq's borders. You know, the neoconservatives. When you look back to these people and their decisions, what you'll find is a situation where individuals were operating purely off ideology. They clearly knew next to nothing about Iraq, but believed so passionately that they were right about it that they just buried their heads and plowed forward. This type of thinking has clearly turned out to be disastrous. I wouldn't want people like this in charge of Iraq policy.
Now let's think about the people who keep calling on President Bush to bring the troops home. It turns out that this group of people is guilty of exactly the same thing that the neocons are. For whatever reason (I'm sure there are many) they've buried their heads and plowed forward without really thinking about what would happen if they get what they want.
The ultimate unpleasant truth here is that the Iraqi government has to be able to defend itself before we can leave. If we leave a moment before that occurs, the government will be slaughtered, and then we really would see chaos in Iraq. There would be real killing and real bloodshed, the likes of which we have not seen. Everything that's been happening seems bad, I know, but believe me, it could get much worse.
It's bad enough that people blinded by ideology got us into this war and then made it much more difficult than it should have been. But to turn around and listen to a different group of people that is just as blind isn't going to fix things. If we left and Iraq's government was slaughtered, it wouldn't take very long before the United States would have to go back and try to restore order.
You may not like that it would happen, but it most certainly would. The worst part of this is that what the United States would face in a situation like this is many times worse than what's happening now. If you think the United States can afford or would allow real chaos in Iraq, you're hopelessly naive.
The point here is not to attack the blind people on either side of this argument. Both sides are clearly passionate about this subject and that's a good thing. We need people to be passionate about Iraq. But we also need people to be smart about Iraq. I'm taking this opportunity to publicly ask my hawkish and pacifist blind friends to take the time to really learn about the country that will be affected in a very real way by your actions.
If you genuinely want things to get better, you have to change your current path because you are (both) leading us to destruction. I would be more than happy to recommend a few books to help you along on your new path. ' Marshall Lilly is an adjunct political science faculty member.
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