There, I said it.
I'm not a fan of this administration, I'm one of those still arguing the 2000 election. I'm a dyed in the wool liberal from the Democratic wing of the Democratic party.
Here's the thing, we broke that country. Iraq was a terrible, repressive regime, but it worked. It doesn't work anymore. And we're responsible. I know many people who will jump up and down yelling, "Not My President" but the fact is that we live in a democracy and we are all responsible for the actions of this government. Even if we didn't vote for it. Even if we're in a blue state.
We, as a nation, broke Iraq and it's actually our responsibility to fix it.
The current discourse on Iraq bases everything on the revisionist claim that we went to war in Iraq to free the Iraqis. We know that's not true.
Ted Koppel commented on this on NPR the other day:
We've been given so many bad reasons for why we went to war in Iraq — those weapons of mass destruction, Hussein and his neighbors, Hussein and al-Qaida, establishing democracy — that we've actually convinced ourselves that we did it for them… for the Iraqis; not because it served the U.S. national interest.
That makes it easy to depict the Iraqis as a bunch of underperforming, ungrateful wretches; and if they don't start shaping up, we're pulling out.
That's bullshit. And we know it on the left. The oppressed Iraqis became the justification for the war after all the others turned out to be lies. And considering how poorly things are going for them, it's not a very good justification.
We know this is hypocrisy. We're blaming the victim. But we're so focused on getting the hell out of there that we haven't spent any time thinking about our responsibility to fix what we broke. There's this idea that we're incapable of doing anything right here, so we should just bail.
Colin Powell's Pottery Barn rule says, "You break it, you own it." We 'own' this mess regardless of our individual political affiliations. If we have to send in more troops to clean it up, then that's what we have to do.
Leaving Iraq to burn after we lit the match and poured the gasoline is wrong. I don't know how to fix it, but I know it would be irresponsible for us to just walk away.
Continue reading "The Pottery Barn rule" »