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There was a march in Washington today to protest the war; somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 people showed up, including celebrities (Jane Fonda! I don't know who thought it was a good idea to invite her...), politicians (Rep. Conyers of Michigan), and active-duty service-members in civilian clothes.
Back during the buildup to the war, and in the early days of it, there was a protest every Friday afternoon on the Lake Street bridge. At some point, that stopped. I think about that occasionally when I drive over the bridge on a Friday afternoon, and find myself looking for them. I'm not sure there's much point in starting up again, though; I mean, who's left that they need to convince? A decisive majority of Americans now say that the war was a bad idea from the get-go and we need to get the hell out, now. A majority in Congress agree. Bush doesn't care. That is the biggest reason I haven't participated in any activism, even at a local level: the sense of utter futility. I think that if every single person on the planet were opposed to escalation, and God came down in person and told Bush that he had his head up his ass, it still wouldn't matter.
I post to a bulletin board that archives old posts pretty much indefinitely, and this week I looked up my own comments from 2003 to see whether, as I thought, I had predicted this exact outcome. It turns out I was much less pessimistic than I remembered. I thought the war was a terrible idea, and I was expecting Iraq to collapse into civil war, but I was expecting it to happen after we pulled out. I assumed that while we were there, we would be able to impose stability and order long enough to install some facsimile of a democratically elected government, but it wouldn't matter because it would collapse once we left. I think I did note that the insurgency (I was calling them the "Iraqi irregulars" at that point, because the term "insurgency" hadn't caught on yet and I refused to call people "terrorists" when they were shooting at soldiers occupying their own country) could gain in strength and organization; I viewed that as a risk, though, not as a certainty. So really, I was a lot more optimistic than was warranted.
And now? I mean, yes, pretty much everyone who isn't named "Bush" agrees now that this war was a terrible idea. The fact that no WMDs were used against us when we invaded demonstrates pretty decisively that there were no WMDs that were a threat to us in Iraq. The fact that Iraqis are dying by the thousand makes it pretty clear that we didn't improve their lot by invading. So what do we do? Just pull out and leave them to it?
If we could bring stability, if we could "fix what we broke," I think we'd be obligated to do it. They had a functioning country, and we took that away. They had a stable government (even if it wasn't at all a nice one), and we took that away. They had roads, power, hospital, schools....we took all those things away. It ought to be incumbent on us to make things right.
But right now there is a civil war on in which both sides are shooting at us. Everything we have done has only made things worse. A decisive majority of Iraqis want us to just get the hell out. And contrary to what Bush thinks, reality is under no obligation to be convenient: "because it has to" does not mean that escalation will help when nothing else has.
So yes. Get the hell out, already. We have lost, so bring people home and see if Iraq can straighten out the mess we left behind, because I don't think anything we do is going to make things better.
I have heard it suggested (not by anyone intending to be taken seriously) that we could have won the Vietnam War if we had simply made it explicit that the Vietnamese were our enemy and that our objective was to conquer them. I actually saw a letter to the paper last week from someone non-ironically suggesting this option in Iraq.
Back during the buildup to the war, and in the early days of it, there was a protest every Friday afternoon on the Lake Street bridge. At some point, that stopped. I think about that occasionally when I drive over the bridge on a Friday afternoon, and find myself looking for them. I'm not sure there's much point in starting up again, though; I mean, who's left that they need to convince? A decisive majority of Americans now say that the war was a bad idea from the get-go and we need to get the hell out, now. A majority in Congress agree. Bush doesn't care. That is the biggest reason I haven't participated in any activism, even at a local level: the sense of utter futility. I think that if every single person on the planet were opposed to escalation, and God came down in person and told Bush that he had his head up his ass, it still wouldn't matter.
I post to a bulletin board that archives old posts pretty much indefinitely, and this week I looked up my own comments from 2003 to see whether, as I thought, I had predicted this exact outcome. It turns out I was much less pessimistic than I remembered. I thought the war was a terrible idea, and I was expecting Iraq to collapse into civil war, but I was expecting it to happen after we pulled out. I assumed that while we were there, we would be able to impose stability and order long enough to install some facsimile of a democratically elected government, but it wouldn't matter because it would collapse once we left. I think I did note that the insurgency (I was calling them the "Iraqi irregulars" at that point, because the term "insurgency" hadn't caught on yet and I refused to call people "terrorists" when they were shooting at soldiers occupying their own country) could gain in strength and organization; I viewed that as a risk, though, not as a certainty. So really, I was a lot more optimistic than was warranted.
And now? I mean, yes, pretty much everyone who isn't named "Bush" agrees now that this war was a terrible idea. The fact that no WMDs were used against us when we invaded demonstrates pretty decisively that there were no WMDs that were a threat to us in Iraq. The fact that Iraqis are dying by the thousand makes it pretty clear that we didn't improve their lot by invading. So what do we do? Just pull out and leave them to it?
If we could bring stability, if we could "fix what we broke," I think we'd be obligated to do it. They had a functioning country, and we took that away. They had a stable government (even if it wasn't at all a nice one), and we took that away. They had roads, power, hospital, schools....we took all those things away. It ought to be incumbent on us to make things right.
But right now there is a civil war on in which both sides are shooting at us. Everything we have done has only made things worse. A decisive majority of Iraqis want us to just get the hell out. And contrary to what Bush thinks, reality is under no obligation to be convenient: "because it has to" does not mean that escalation will help when nothing else has.
So yes. Get the hell out, already. We have lost, so bring people home and see if Iraq can straighten out the mess we left behind, because I don't think anything we do is going to make things better.
I have heard it suggested (not by anyone intending to be taken seriously) that we could have won the Vietnam War if we had simply made it explicit that the Vietnamese were our enemy and that our objective was to conquer them. I actually saw a letter to the paper last week from someone non-ironically suggesting this option in Iraq.
