Oh … and by the way, there weren’t any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. None. Nada. Zilch. We attacked a sovereign nation for no reason. We have brought more instability to the middle east. We have entangled ourselves in country with no way out. For what reason? People are dying. Americans, Iraqis, all kinds of people. Because it was that important to remove Saddam Hussein? So important that we could not even plan out an occupation strategy? Did Rumsfeld really believe we would be greeted as liberators?

We are trapped. If we stay, we will spend who knows how much money on this effort, and that’s the small price. The larger price tag will paid with lives of American Soldiers and Iraqi Civilians. If we leave, there will be chaos. Possibly a civil war. Shiites vs Sunnis vs Kurds. It would probably spill over the borders into Iran, Syria and Turkey. So we will stay. We will stay and prop up the government that we created for them. This is not the first time we’ve done this. We propped up Saigon for over a decade. I don’t have to tell you how that story ended.

I don’t have any good answers for this problem. But I’m mad as hell. Because this problem exists for no reason. I cannot understand why the Bush administration pushed this war on us. It’s not like we didn’t already have one. We have this whole War on Terror to deal with. Did they really think that they could just go in, depose Saddam and leave? Did they think they could distract us from the failure to capture Osama with this?

I’m a pacifist by nature. I don’t think that going to war is a desirable tactic. But sometimes it must happen. I wasn’t opposed to the War on Afghanistan. We could not sit back and allow Al Queda to operate freely in that country. They had attacked our country. We needed to defend ourselves. But a preemptive war, that’s a whole different thing. Even if Saddam had been stockpiling nukes, it is dicey business saying that you must attack another country because they might attack you. If that were a valid doctrine, then shouldn’t we attack North Korea? Iran? Syria? China? Where does it end?

Some would accuse me of dwelling on problems without offering solutions. That argument pisses me off too. I wouldn’t have attacked Iraq. I would have never taken the United States into a pre-emptive war. I would have never been so arrogant to assume that people of Iraq would be happy to have foreigners, invaders with machine guns roaming their streets. Yet I’m supposed to offer a solution. Try this one: Don’t go starting wars. That’s my solution. War is messy business. People die. Lives are ruined. Limbs are lost. Families shattered. I would not enter into that so lightly.

It’s too late for that. We are in. I don’t think we get out easily. We face a paradox right now. If we install a truly democratic government in Iraq, it will almost certainly be anti-American. That is the will of the people there. They don’t like us. I don’t blame them. If we manipulate the system so that the Iraqi government is friendly to us, then it will fall. Unless of course we prop it up. Like I said, we are going to be there for a while. And I’m gonna be mad about it the whole time.