Why I Think We Should Pull Out of Iraq

This morning I received an e-mail from a friend asking me, in effect, why I believe we should pull our forces out of Iraq. What follows is my attempt to answer her question.

For me, the keys to my reasoning as to why we should pull out of Iraq lie in the true answers to two questions;
a. Who are the so called “insurgents?”
b. What is our mission in Iraq?

Bush, the military, and, unfortunately, even the media, without exception, refer to the insurgents when they mean patriots. The Iraqi insurgents are simply Muslim patriots who are fighting a non-Islamic invader and occupier of their country. Fundamentally, we have no right to occupy Iraq. The argument that we must occupy Iraq for the good of the Iraqi people, is an ancient, but bankrupted, excuse for oppression.

Again, Bush, the military, and the media have failed to release a statement defining the military mission that our occupation of Iraq is directed toward accomplishing. Bush, as always, assumes the American people are simple minded, and talks of having to fight terrorism in Iraq so we won’t have to fight them on American soil. Terrorism is his boogey man so he paints a picture of boat loads of terrorists, waiting to infiltrate our boarders the moment our military pull out of Iraq. Which of course, is pure, high-grade bullshit. The facts are that, rather than suppressing and holding back terrorism, our occupation of Iraq is providing an ideal situation for encouraging, recruiting and training of terrorists.

When we invaded Iraq, the mission was to disarm the Iraqi Army and terminate Saddam Hussein’s rule. Well the Iraqi army was disarmed and is now being rebuilt according to our liking. Hussein is dead. Our mission is accomplished and we can leave.

Now, however, although no authority has said so, one supposes, from merely observing current events in Iraq, that our mission has become so broad and complex that it cannot be communicated in a simple statement. We can, however, state what must be major elements of the unstated mission. That is: recruit and train both the Iraqi Army and national police forces; rebuild the service infrastructure of the nation; fight off the patriots trying to end our occupation; stop the religious war going on between the two major Islamic sects; get the economy functioning to the point that it will sustain employment; and, lastly, kill as many true terrorists as we can find.

Small wonder no authority has attempted to put forth a concise statement of this mishmash of goals since they are clearly unattainable.

Putting it differently, it seems to me, that if you cannot justify the death and maiming of the youth of America in a simple, concise, statement, you ought to stop the military action causing the death and maiming.

Such a statement has not and cannot be written. So, I say, we should leave.

Honor and the Japanese Government

Honor, is a concept not much in vogue today, but its origins can be traced back to the Iliad. In our society, it has become merely a title used primarily to address judges.

The decline of the use of the term honor is, I suspect, because so few of us in modern society possess it. Since the rise of the “Me First” generation and the current do-anything-to-get-ahead, commercial culture, where celebrities and Chief Executives of large corporations are convicted of felonies , and two-star generals are regularly replaced for dereliction of duty, it is no wonder the notion of personal honor has just about disappeared from our society.

Recent articles in the New York Times reported that Shinzo Abe, the Prime Minister of Japan, has denied that, during World War II: (a) the Japanese Imperial Army employed female sex slaves throughout the lands they occupied and (b) knowingly deceived trusting civilians into committing suicide during final days of the battle for Okinawa. Mr. Abe went so far as to have the Ministry of Education revise the current school text books to delete references to these dishonorable acts.

We should not be surprised at these attempts to re-write history. For as Earl St. Vincent, First Lord of the British Admiralty in 1805, noted, honor may be compared to the chastity of a woman, and, when once lost, may never by recovered.

Of course the Japanese government must deny such a loss of honor. Today, the Japanese people and their government have remade their country and their culture. They are justly proud of their accomplishments. But, the Japanese government, and by association, the Japanese nation, have no honor and cannot recover it. So they deny the loss.