My feelings about this war had always been that that causus belli was wrongly laid, the course was wrongly set, the methods and missions were often unclear, the cost too great, and the desired outcome never stated--if there was a wrong way to do anything, I think the Bush Administration tried the wrong way of doing things. This is not a slight at all against the men and women of our armed forces and the support contract personnel who served in Iraq; my complaint is with the politicians and REMFs and war profiteers who served the people of Iraq and the people who served my country and those other members of the coalition so poorly that more was not done to minimize casualties, preserve infrastructure, maybe do a thousand things that might have prevented the many tragedies to civilians, to children, to the reputation of my country, and to prevent the images burned into my mind, and the minds of so many others who never thought this war was either right to begin with, or executed properly once engaged. I can not look back at this last decade of war with much more than regret that the antiwar voices were not heard out, that Congress didn't seem to debate, so much as permit, and that we all seem to have been lied to in the run-up to the invasion.
I'm still bitter. And while I have conflicted and unsatisfactory feelings about how things are being left there--the point has to be our leaving. There just isn't more that can be done. It's been enough--honestly!
And so this should be a proud announcement in my eyes, that my President has followed through on wrapping up this chapter in American warfare. And yet....and yet.....
My point as a blogger is not attention to things that please me, but things that aggrieve me. Abu Ghraib aggrieved me. The detention of people without trial aggrieves me. The mission creep and nation-building way this war was treated like a mafia bust-out for contractors and the way the Pentagon can't account for all the money spent in Iraq aggrieve me. The way the Iraqi in the street was cut out of his or her national self-determination aggrieves me. All these things are nothing to my daily life, though, by the way. They are just things I chose to be concerned about as a person with a conscience.
There is a candidate for president who has found my unique ire, here. Her campaign is dead, her NH staff flown for warmer campaigns, her poll numbers ridiculous and her presence in a national campaign absurd, but I have to address Rep. Michele Bachmann's idea that Iraq somehow should pay us from their nice oil revenues for all the hard work we did in ridding them of their nasty old dictator.
I must here disabuse my readers of the notion, if they should chance to share it with the Congresswoman in question, that the US is interested in the criminal practice of shakedown artistry, and that we employ our military as an extension of a grand global protection racket. We do not, and when we commit our troops to a goal, it should be for something other than monetary compensation, but rather the furtherance of security or humaniarian goals, carefully selected.
If she is under the impression that the US military was contracted by the Iraqi people like so many soldiers-for-hire and that there has been a price promised, she can deliver the bill herself and see how far that gets her. Otherwise, her suggestion is simply ghoulish and tacky, and beneath the sober reality of the thousands of Iraqi civilians including children who show as items on this wars' butchers bill, and the generation of orphaned, mained, and/or traumatized children that we will never be able to quite be able to answer to when they confront us with the simple question--Why?
I hope she is by now done with her quest for the role of Commander-in-Chief. Her idea that the US should be compensated for the misery caused to others displays the reality that she lacks the character for the job.
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