Let Our People Go

Let Our People Go

Our soldiers have been in Iraq for a long time and some would have us stay even longer, maybe indefinitely. I am one who feels that we have stayed too long and we should never have gone there in the first place. I ask if staying longer reduces the potential for great violence after we leave or is that violence inevitable whenever we go.

Ask yourself, are our troops like a bandage over a wound giving it a chance to heal and when the wound scabs over we can go? Or are they like a dam holding back the water and whenever we go a flood will occur? I think it's the dam. The people over there have been in bloody conflict for centuries. Unfortunately, they will have to work it out themselves. We are just in the way. We are like a boxing referee holding back the fighters and as soon as we step back they are going to try to kill each other. It doesn't matter when we leave, the consequences will be the same. The difference is that the sooner we leave, the less of our people will be killed and maimed in the process.

Another possibility exists, and I hope this is the scenario that plays out. The Sunni awakening of 2006 may have been the turning point in the war between the Sunni and Shi'a. A coalition of Sunni leaders got together and decided who the real enemy is... fellow Sunnis, Al-Qaeda in Iraq. If the Sunni and Shi'a could actually work together, there may be peace after all. So we can look at our involvement in Iraq another way. Our presence drew in Al-Qaeda and the presence of Al-Qaeda got the Iraqis together! Wouldn't that be ironic. And then we can give credit where credit is due. If a new Iraqi nation forms and there is peace, THE IRAQIS will have to make it happen, our military will have nothing to do with it.

No matter whether the Iraqi people have a bloody civil war ahead of them or the worst has passed, we need to get out of there. Define victory as "getting the country into a position to shape itself" and leave!

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