The Foolish Bush/McCain Iraq Escalationby
Bill Barnwell How many lives is it worth to President Bush, Senator McCain, and the minority of those in America who support "finishing the job at any cost" in Iraq? Apparently many more than have already been lost on both sides. If the news this morning is correct, President Bush is gearing up to escalate the war by sending even more troops to Iraq. At a time when a growing number of Americans are beginning to question the wisdom of an indefinite nation-building engagement in the Middle East, Bush and McCain have decided to entrench American forces even deeper. Basically, these two men and their supporters don’t give a flip about what the majority has to say and are ready and willing to ask Americans to sacrifice beyond what they already desire to bring "stability" to Iraq. You do have to give the President and McCain credit. They are consistent and they are true believers in their cause. I’m certain that they sincerely feel they are making the right decision and that they won’t let the polls influence their decisions. But not only are they unmoved by polls, the last few years have shown that they are also unmoved by reality. And the latter is the real problem here. Considering that the War Party has been blinded by objective reality from before the invasion even started, there isn’t much reason to assume they will be any better in the future. Their calls for escalation only solidify this suspicion. When the war planners and supporters were gearing up for invasion they were calling dissenters nasty names and accusing them of being unpatriotic. However, when you go back and read the predictions of those of us who cautioned against going to war, we have been proven mostly correct regarding the consequences and outcome we are now facing. It frightens me in fact that a 21-year-old college student was more perceptive of the risks involved back in 2002 than were all the supposedly brilliant and trustworthy people in the highest ranks of government (and all their journalistic and academic supporters) who plunged us into this war without realistically assessing the consequences it would bring. For the record, I am not happy things have occurred basically as some of us skeptics warned that it might. I’m not pleased there has been so much loss of life on both sides and so much destruction. I really wish I and others like me who opposed the war from the start would have been wrong about everything. This isn’t about sticking it to the President (who I did reluctantly vote for in 2000, by the way) or about who is right and who is wrong. This is about whether the President and his supporters are leading us on the right course with their foreign policy. The President probably thinks he will go down in history as another Harry Truman. Truman was an unpopular President fighting an unpopular war when he left office. But in recent decades there has been enough historical revisionism that many today view Truman as a tough man of principle and a generally good President. This exalted view of Truman is very questionable to say the least, but let’s just accept it for the sake of argument. Will history really look back and say that our efforts in Iraq were "worth it" or the right thing to do? Perhaps. Maybe Iraq really will become a flourishing democracy. But as things stand now, it’s equally likely that the final result with be a democratic government of Islamic extremists or a carved up Iraq following an even bloodier civil war. Let’s also just assume that Iraq really will become a flouring Western-style democracy following years of even greater sacrifice, as the President apparently is going to call for. Remolding Iraq was never the reason that the majority of Americans initially backed the President for invading Iraq. The reasons the average person supported going to war back in 2002 and early 2003 were because they believed Iraq posed a physical threat to the United States in the form of WMD’s and because they wanted to see Saddam Hussein removed from leadership. Of course the first concern was an illusion and the second objective was accomplished less than a month after the bombs started falling. They never signed on to this idea that the President is trying to sell now of an indefinite nation building exercise in the Middle East. I suspect that if Americans would have had a choice back then, including those who supported the war, they would have been fine without the third objective which most of them didn’t share to begin with. But the President has told the country that we must "finish the job" and that we must not "cut and run." Now he is going to tell us that we need to sacrifice even further and for who knows how many more years. In the big picture, all will be worth it supposedly. What price, however, are we willing to pay to quell the "sectarian violence"? What price are we willing to pay to make democracy safe for Shiite fundamentalists in Iraq? And in what sense is any of this "protecting our freedoms"? If anything, Americans are just as scared today as they were four year ago. Also keep in mind there was no al-Qaeda presence in Iraq until the previous thuggish regime was deposed and that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. Now, just as more people are tiring of the sacrifice, we have the President and McCain telling us we need to sacrifice even more. Some even say that since there have "only" been 3,000 deaths so far compared to the thousands more in other wars, that we should stop whining and just "finish the job." Again, how much is all this worth to us? Those who support escalation like McCain are willing to spend billions more and lose thousands of more lives to see their objectives accomplished. To those in power, no price is too big for them to be proven right and to show everyone else that the massive amounts of loss are "worth it." Perhaps history really will vindicate President Bush and the McCainiac "win at any cost" policy. But recent history isn’t on their side and reasons to be optimistic in the future are lacking. We need to collectively ask ourselves how much we are willing to give to accomplish the grand mission of remaking Iraq. Most of us have said enough is enough. The President and McCain are calling for more and more. January 3, 2007 Bill Barnwell [send him mail] is a pastor and writer from Michigan. He holds both a Master of Ministry degree and a Master of Arts in Theological Studies degree from Bethel College in Mishawaka, Indiana. Visit his blog. Copyright © 2007 LewRockwell.com |
It
would be sad and ironic for these two if time judges their escalations
and the entire exercise as one of the worst decisions in the history
of American foreign policy. While bad for them, it might eventually
be good for the rest of us and our children. Perhaps one day down
the road the same mistakes of Truman, Johnson, Nixon, Bush, and
the rest will finally stop being repeated once and for all.