Last combat troops exit Baghdad, Iraqi Freedom comes to an end.
At last, the war in Iraq is coming to an end. While troops will remain in Iraq until December 2011, they will no longer be serving a combat function. Instead focus will now shift to training the Iraqi forces so that domestic forces can handle their own affairs. History will be the ultimate judge of whether it was in America's best interest to sacrifice 4,400 of our bravest along with tens of thousands more wounded, hundreds of billions of dollars of money we do not actually have and scores of Iraqis caught in collateral damage. Unfortunately it will prove to just as difficult to gauge the success of the war as it was to understand the original goal behind our presence. Wars have additional costs beyond the lost lives, wounded families and financial burdens - they create a mental and emotional investment that is impossible to walk away from.
For every single soldier killed, every innocent Iraqi lost and every dollar spent it becomes impossible to leave until a subjective goal is achieved. In our particular case our subjective goal was a democratic Iraq with a certain level of stability. Even as of this writing we have information that just several weeks ago attacks by Shiite militias were being escalated in Southern Iraq and even the exit of our troops suggests that our generals are still very much concerned about a dangerous Iraq. So the nagging and awfully persistent question of "Was this worth it?" can never be answered until the subjective goal is realized and so our commitment deepens until we are forced to admit that we were either chasing an impossible goal or to quickly change the goal as to justify an exit.
This is a mistake that had plagued nations for hundreds of years, even when conquest was a quantifiable goal. In the modern age where conquest is frowned upon we the final destination becomes even more arbitrary and difficult to achieve. Our previous administration made an unforgivable error on two fronts. First, Bush changed the directive from something that many Americans could support, eliminating Saddam and the threat of WMDs to a directive that most Americans could not support, installing a way of governance inside a sovereign nation.
We as Americans have been placed into a most uncomfortable situation where our safety now depends on a coalition of federal agencies who claim to be the best at what they do, intelligence. When our top CIA officials along with elements of Defense in 2003 claimed that our lives were in danger with a hostile Iraq we were left with little choice. Either we distrust our government, thus questioning their very existence or we assume that hundreds of billions of dollars spent on defense every year actually achieve a purpose. Some of us chose to trust, especially after something as tragic as 9/11. Instead of admitting this error, something Americans could have understood, Bush put forth a new set of tasks in order to justify the original invasion.
This should be the lesson from the Iraq war, a lesson that we could utilize and put forth instead of slinging useless partisan mud slinging. We as Americans can no longer afford to instill our own values and way of living upon other countries, nor should we be accepting that our Department of Defense can be run better than so many other government institutions that we despise due to their inefficiency and grotesque waste! It is equally foolish for liberals to bemoan the spending of hundreds of billions on Defense as it is for conservatives to bemoan Social Security, Medicare, Welfare, Housing and other wasteful programs. When one takes away the emotional aspects, all is left at the root of the problem is exactly the same issue, that is, some things in this life are simply not supposed to be run by the federal government and our founding fathers understood that over 200 years ago.
For every single soldier killed, every innocent Iraqi lost and every dollar spent it becomes impossible to leave until a subjective goal is achieved. In our particular case our subjective goal was a democratic Iraq with a certain level of stability. Even as of this writing we have information that just several weeks ago attacks by Shiite militias were being escalated in Southern Iraq and even the exit of our troops suggests that our generals are still very much concerned about a dangerous Iraq. So the nagging and awfully persistent question of "Was this worth it?" can never be answered until the subjective goal is realized and so our commitment deepens until we are forced to admit that we were either chasing an impossible goal or to quickly change the goal as to justify an exit.
This is a mistake that had plagued nations for hundreds of years, even when conquest was a quantifiable goal. In the modern age where conquest is frowned upon we the final destination becomes even more arbitrary and difficult to achieve. Our previous administration made an unforgivable error on two fronts. First, Bush changed the directive from something that many Americans could support, eliminating Saddam and the threat of WMDs to a directive that most Americans could not support, installing a way of governance inside a sovereign nation.
We as Americans have been placed into a most uncomfortable situation where our safety now depends on a coalition of federal agencies who claim to be the best at what they do, intelligence. When our top CIA officials along with elements of Defense in 2003 claimed that our lives were in danger with a hostile Iraq we were left with little choice. Either we distrust our government, thus questioning their very existence or we assume that hundreds of billions of dollars spent on defense every year actually achieve a purpose. Some of us chose to trust, especially after something as tragic as 9/11. Instead of admitting this error, something Americans could have understood, Bush put forth a new set of tasks in order to justify the original invasion.
This should be the lesson from the Iraq war, a lesson that we could utilize and put forth instead of slinging useless partisan mud slinging. We as Americans can no longer afford to instill our own values and way of living upon other countries, nor should we be accepting that our Department of Defense can be run better than so many other government institutions that we despise due to their inefficiency and grotesque waste! It is equally foolish for liberals to bemoan the spending of hundreds of billions on Defense as it is for conservatives to bemoan Social Security, Medicare, Welfare, Housing and other wasteful programs. When one takes away the emotional aspects, all is left at the root of the problem is exactly the same issue, that is, some things in this life are simply not supposed to be run by the federal government and our founding fathers understood that over 200 years ago.
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