Reply #1: I felt scared for the first time last night [View All]

[ant]

"My own feeling is we've embarked on a horrific, calamitous mistake in Iraq. We're already in a situation we have very little control over and very little ability to get out of, without leaving everything much worse off."

For a while now I've been thinking this'll all turn out OK. It'll be hard, it'll be long, but eventually, somehow, Iraq will turn out OK. The right people will eventually step in to do the right thing, etc.

Last night, over a couple of beers with my DC friends - we're all young and work in int'l affairs and like to think we'll one day run the world - a friend of mine at a big non-profit started telling me about how pessimistic the higher ups in her office are. No one thinks there's a solution here, and these are left-leaning, very well connected people who have spent their lives coming up with solutions.

The irony is that a big casualty of this war for me has been my rather lefty belief that powerful nations can do something to help/save the oppressed. Despite my opposition to this war, despite the loss of innocent life, I clung to that silver lining of Saddam being gone and the people of Iraq having a chance. I'm learning now that the kind of chance they need is the kind of chance people can only give themselves. People need to storm their own government palaces and tear down their own walls and rebuild their own governments in order for true freedom and democracy to flourish.

This is NOT an argument in favor of a US pullout. A power vacuum now will only bring back a new dictator, perhaps someone or some group worse than Saddam. I believe it would be morally if not legally wrong for the US to do that. While I don't know what the solution is here, my gut tells me that at this point it's a matter of preventing even more harm rather than actually doing any good. We're treading water, trying like hell to not drown. The option of swimming to shore doesn't even exist.

Fuck you, Bush.

/end rant