Home >> Middle East >> Iraq

     Email   Print 

The Idiocy of the Iraq War

Kyle Bristow - 7/3/2008

As of June 16, 2008, 4,101 American soldiers have been killed in Iraq since the war began on March 19, 2003, and at least 30,000 have been wounded—arguably for a cause that was not, is not, and will not ever be in America’s interest to have undertaken.

According to Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz in an op-ed published by Times entitled “The Three Trillion Dollar War” (2/23/2008), “The cost of direct US military operations—not even including long-term costs such as taking care of wounded veterans—already exceeds the cost of the 12-year war in Vietnam and is more than double the cost of the Korean War.” Stiglitz goes on in his op-ed to prophesize that the Iraq War will cost the American people upwards of $3 trillion.

For all of the sacrifices the American people have made to fund the war in both blood and money, what has been accomplished? Before the war al-Qaeda did not have operations in Iraq, but now it does. Before the war Iranian attempts to gain hegemonic power of the region were kept in check by a hostile Iraq, but since Saddam Hussein was dethroned, the balance of power has shifted in Iran’s favor. Before the war secularism imposed on the Iraqi people by Saddam Hussein kept the Islamic beast at bay, but the same cannot be said of Iraq today.

The premises used to justify the invasion of Iraq—that the Iraqi dictator had weapons of mass destruction in his arsenal, Iraq posed a threat to Israel, and democracy in the Middle East is a good thing—are asinine. Even if Iraq did have weapons of mass destruction, why should we care? Third World hellholes like China and Pakistan also have nuclear weapons—should we invade those “countries,” too?

Whether or not Iraq posed a threat to Israel is irrelevant, because in American foreign policy, Israel should be irrelevant. Israel is not an American state (although some neoconservatives may believe it to be), and so its security should not be of our concern. Spending $3 trillion and 4,101 lives to protect Israel from a perceived threat is not in America’s interest.

Believing that the spread of democracy is a good thing is moronic, and believing that the savage, cave-dwelling, goat-herding, nomadic, Bedouin camel jockeys are even capable of self-rule through democracy is to grossly overestimate our enemies. Western civilization and its traits—one being self-rule—cannot be imposed on a non-Western people. Take Rhodesia for example. While Rhodesia was run by Europeans, the country was so prosperous that it was referred to as “the jewel of Africa.” Now that the indigenous peoples there gave self-rule a try, Robert Mugabe has since then turned the country into just another backwards, Third World conflagration. A secular dictator who will keep Islam in check is the best we can hope for in the Arab world. And we hanged that dictator and we shot his two sons for good measure.

It is idealistic to believe that the world can be made into some kind of utopia through the spread of democracy. Conservatives should reject the Iraq War for this reason alone.

If making Muslims pay for the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 is the objective of the Iraq War—which many neoconservatives believe it to be—then leaving Saddam Hussein in power would have been a better course of action than invading Iraq, for Saddam Hussein would have killed more Muslims in his lifetime than George W. Bush ever will. Take the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s for example. In that conflict Saddam Hussein’s forces killed somewhere between 500,000 to 1 million Iranian Muslims. Godfrey de Bouillon would have been impressed.

We invaded a country which did not ever attack the American people or pose a threat to American liberty, and the invasion has directly allowed Islamic fundamentalism to take root, has allowed al-Qaeda to begin operations in Iraq, has allowed Iran to gain political power in the region to the point of becoming the hegemon, and has made America less safe, for al-Qaeda has more members today than it did prior to September 11, 2001, arguably due to the resentment that Muslims have of the American invasion of Iraq.

The neoconservatives believe in their warped way of thinking that the Iraq War is somehow preventing Islamic terrorism from occurring in the United States, and so, they justify the invasion and occupation of Iraq as being a preventative war. The neoconservatives maintain that “if we do not fight the Muslims over there, then we will have to fight them over here.” In Patrick Buchanan’s newest book entitled Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War, he writes that Bismarck once said that preventative war is “like committing suicide out of fear of death.”

Only time will tell if America completes her suicide attempt.