Elijah and Azuu

Author notes

#1284 Armageddon: Not so Clever

Inkmonkey

on July 16, 2007

I was watching President Bush talk last Thursday about how the war is going (poorly, but he's optimistic), and about the risks of withdrawing troops early. The big fear is that leaving will make America look weak, and as such give strength to its enemies, such as Al Qaeda. A bit of a "macho" point of view, but I can understand it. Now, the interesting thing I noticed about his description about Al Qaeda was that he basically described them as an extremist group that uses violence to enforce their way of life on others. Now, let's pause an think about that… using violence to change the government of another country. Isn't that what we're doing? Granted, we're being a bit more honest about it, since we're using a good-old fashioned war instead of sneaking in and just decimating innocent lives.

The big point is that, unchecked, terrorists groups like Al Qaeda will be able to run free and will, perhaps, cause another horrible tragedy like we saw on 9/11; an event that took over 3,000 innocent lives. Yet I wonder: how many innocent people were killed–I'm sorry, how many "civillian casualties" occured during our "war on Terror"? Is it working? Well, the Iraqi people are getting their military together pretty efficiently which, according to Bush, should lead to a stable government any minute now. Well, not really a "stable" government so much as a government that our Nation's leaders are happy with. Hussein's reign was "stable", it just also involved a lot of torture and the slaughter of his enemies and such-like. Practices our own government almost never utilizes… mostly.

Speaking of Suddam, Bush also mentioned that the war was justified because the UN had ordered Suddam to present and then dismantle any weapons of Mass Destruction he had stored or was in the process of creating in his country. He refused, and went back and forth with UN diplomats for years. So the Iraqi government disobeyed the UN, thus making an attack on it justified. Yet the attack on Iraq was itself heavily opposed by the United Nations, and I'll let you think of that what you will.

There's a lot of complaints one can make about hypocrisy and your usual "woulda'-shoulda'-coulda'"s that come with this sort of thing, but I think what's really sad is that, at this point, we can't just "pull out". The chaos we've brought to Iraq needs some degree of organization, I just don't know how much of it is really any of our business. I am, of course, no expert on such matters, but I can't help but notice some things when they're staring me in the face.

Ah, you'll have to excuse me for ranting about political things. Really, I'm not very politically-minded, most of the time, but there are certain things I hear that just make me stop and reconsider what the Hell is going on in this world of ours.