In Response!

This was a response to a former student, a very conservative Republican partisan who said that the war in Iraq "wasn't all bad", because several Iraqi students were able to enroll in an International Human Rights Law Class. He said, in effect, war is bad, but good things can come from it, that it's more important that we learn from our mistakes. I responded to his post by name, which I won't use here.

 

"I need to expound on the above. The war had little bearing on whether or not Iraqi students could come to school in the US. They could, and did, before. There are just fewer of them now, since many young Iraqis were killed. Our reasons for being in Iraq were far less compelling, even, than our reason(s) for being in Vietnam. Bush White House insiders, later sickened by the results, have been very open regarding the fact that the Iraq adventure was a done deal as a result of Bush's election, and justifying it became job one. The advantage of not being hard wired into supporting a regime which was demonstrably corrupt is the opportunity to objectively evaluate it. Partisan politics clouds that objectivity. Iraq was wrong, and would have been so regardless of who ordered it. Saying there are good results from this horrid war is like pointing to sucessful Vietnamese immigrants or Holocaust survivors who have prospered in the US and saying "see, look what we did! The fact is, we didn't learn from even Cheyney's own warning to G.H.W. Bush, when as SecDef he warned about taking Baghdad and over throwing Saddam after Desert Storm. At that time Cheyney warned the father that doing so would make us responsible for rebuilding Iraq. He was right then, but ignored his own advice ten years later. It pains me that one of the brightest persons I ever taught has been so inculcated with "Conservative" ideals that those ideals become a reason for blind adherence. Equating the benefit of a handful of students with the death of > 1 million as a cost/benefit example is insensitive at the least and ghoulish at worst. And as a non-military person, as are so many young Republicans who supported the war, don't lecture a 26 year senior enlisted veteran who truly does understand that sacrifice. Of all the "support our troops" gaggle, the most vocal are the ones who are safe at home conscience cleansing. Donald Rumsfeld was another principal architect of the war, and more importantly the principal dismantler of what short lived effort was made for a reasonable peace in the aftermath. Read the book by the civilian who originally was assigned to oversee the rebuilding of Iraq, and pay attention to all the things Rumsfeld did to insure that civilian and insurgent violence would ensue by countermanding him, alienating the entire former Iraqi military and police, making them the problem rather than allowing them to be contributors to restoring order." Read Reconstructing Iraq  by Gordon Rudd far a sickening saga of interference and undermining of that effort by everyone from Bush on down. The U.S. has spent more reconstructing Iraq and Afghanistan than it did rebuilding Germany after World War II. And it’s not done yet.