The Costs of War
It is extraordinarily important to constantly remember the price that is paid during any war. Given the inherent destruction of resources, property, and, by far most importantly, life, that takes place during armed conflict, only the most clearly reasoned wars must be fought. War should always be an absolute last resort.
Our current armed struggle within Iraq inarguably costs many lives and considerable dollars. It taxes our will and spirit and is paid for by taxes and fiat inflation. Most importantly, it destroys individual lives. Our elected leadership currently needs to stand up and take a humble look in the mirror and realize that a mistaken war has been waged. We, as a society of individuals, have suffered enough through a very questionable war. We continue to suffer and likely will do so through the foreseeable future as Iraq is currently a complete mess and much blood is on the hands of our government’s recent policies.
The question every individual United States citizen needs to ask him or herself is, does this government currently represent what is right and reasonable for the protection of American life, liberty, property and happiness. If the answer is no, we need to change our policies and our leadership very rapidly, and forge a new way forward, based on sound principle and reasoned action. The future we will leave to our children and grandchildren relies on this popular awakening of where we should stand as a nation.
I, for one, argued against the Iraq War from day one, citing the likelihood of chaos once Saddam was overthrown and the fact that Saddam represented the lesser of evils as opposed to a disrupted Middle East. Additionally, principle says a war must be beyond justifiable due to the inherent costs. Plain and simple, this war was ill-conceived.
Click here for Wikipedia’s analysis of the casualties of the current engagement, now well into year five of operations.
Filed under: Politics, Social Mood
I am one who supported the Iraq war from the start and hoped that the war would expand to include Iran and Syria. Because the war has been prosecuted so poorly, and this idiotic nation-building campaign we are involved in has very little chance of any significant success within ten or twenty years, people are justifiably upset with the war. But that does not mean that starting a war with Iraq was the wrong decision. It is amazing to me that politics is more important than national security and the very survival of this country as a prosperous free state, but that is exactly the case now. The terrorists predicted and have counted on the United States losing by attrition over a number of years. They have studied our loss in Vietnam, and Osama bin Laden even credits our withdrawal from Somalia as inspiring him to lead a terrorist movement to destroy the United States.
So now we find ourselves in a terrible situation, we have an incompetent president who thinks that Victory in Iraq means we must create a functioning democracy out of a disfunctional homicidal antidemocratic disaster of a society. Victory should have just been dethroning Sadam and his party of thugs and installing our own ruthless dictator to spend a couple decades slowly building the semi-democratic/secular society that Ataturk was able to create in Turkey. That was a do-able plan. But instead we have an idiot in the White House who just hates to guard any border and doesn’t care how many terrorists sneak into our country and doesn’t care how many car bombs get smuggled into Iraq from Iran to kill several american soldiers every day. More than half our soldiers dying each month are being killed by Iranian made bombs being set off by Iranian paid terrorists, and often simply Iranians, but Bush still won’t guard the Iranian border to stop it. Our politicians promising to get us out of Iraq if they win the next presidential election are encouraging and inspiring the terrorists to keep up their activities. And if we withdraw from Iraq, the terrorists will be victorious and inspired, and then they will come to the United States and start killing us with car bombs and suicide bombs as well as random shootings, arson fires on windy days, and all sorts of mayhem which will drastically affect our lives. It is terribly frustrating to watch our “leaders” lead us down the drain. But then it is also frustrating to watch the mainstream media hide the stories that justify much of the actions we have done. 500 tons of uranium which included two tons of enriched uranium were captured in Iraq during the first couple weeks of the war, but that story only rated page 23 in the New York Times rather than a banner headline that might make Bush look good. Capturing over 1000 artillery shells with chemical warheads doesn’t really count as weapons of mass destruction because they were pretty old and that reason is needed to maintain the lie that no WMD were found in Iraq. Captured documents showing contact and aid flowing from Iraq to Al-Qaida don’t really mean anything because nothing yet has been discovered showing direct aid from Iraq for the 9-11 attack. The captured airplane fuselage used for hijack training and interviews with terrorists explaining how they went to that terrorist training camp ten miles from Baghdad to learn how to hijack airplanes doesn’t really mean Saddam helped Al-Qaida.
For me, the existance of Saddam’s hijacking school for terrorists is the only reason I needed to support bombing Saddam and his country into the stone age. It is very likely that one or more of the 9-11 hijackers trained in Iraq for the 9-11 attack. War with Iraq was entirely justified. Not knowing what to do after winning the shooting part and deposing the government doesn’t mean the initial decision was wrong. Our problem now is that our leaders are so stupid that they have now given decks of cards to our soldiers that have pictures of historic buildings and places in Iraq that our soldiers are supposed to avoid shooting at or bombing even if they are being shot at from those places. That is the kind of idiocy that creates a quagmire.
I really think the Iraqi threat to our country was very minimal. Saddam had a sword hanging over his head and wasn’t going to do anything truly stupid. Now, as we are witnessing, Iraq is a breeding ground for terrorist activity. I think the war lacked justification from the start.
Perhaps we shouldn’t have gotten involved in either WWI or WWII either. It is an insidious liberal mentality that cannot understand this for what it is. You have to have your head up your ass if you think that us leaving Iraq will leave our country , or the world, better off. Are you so stupid to think that they don’t really wantñ”_come here and get us again.
Iraq didn’t attack us dude, “Al Qaida” did.
WWII was the most justifiable war of the ones discussed. Japan attacked us at Pearl Harbor, Germany was sinking merchant ships, not to mention committing aggression against our allies in Western Europe and committing genocide to go along with it, it was clearly a situation where we needed to defend ourselves and our allies.
Now, the Iraq engagement. Did Iraq attack us? No. Did Iraq have a hand in 9/11? I have yet to see any rigorous proof of that. Please provide some, and not a conspiracy website please.
You say “it is an insidious liberal mentality that cannot understand this for what it is.” Well, I’m a classical liberal in the Adam Smith, Ludwig von Mises, Thomas Jefferson sense of the term, but am certainly not a modern “liberal” (read: socialist). Please explain to this classical liberal what exactly the “this” you speak of is? You leave a lot to be desired in your argument.
Comparing our unilateral invasion and occupation of Iraq to WWI and WWII shows ignorance on your part and I think most individuals with any sense see through such arguments plainly. Please provide something more.
I for one am very hesitant to support any war unless it is clear cut that it is necessary for the long-term defense of the life, liberty and property of individual United States citizens or our allies. Unilaterally invading Iraq based on spotty rationalizations does not fit within my category of justification, even if Saddam was a murderous despot. We have unleashed more chaos and fury and have spent countless dollars and American lives in the process. Sorry, but this war has done little but bring further suffering upon United States citizens.
Also Jim, I would just like to ask you something. Do you believe it would be the right thing for America to create a worldwide empire? If we did so, we would eliminate enemies right? Your post implies that “the world would be better off” with us occupying all the troubled areas of the world. Thanks for pondering that idea.