Seattle PI: Iraq Occupation: This war can't be won

[RamboLiberal]

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/229771_basraed.asp

The questions about U.S. presence in Iraq aren't about winning or losing. The driving factor must be improving, protecting and respecting the lives of the Iraqi people.

Those are people such as Hassan Juma Awad and Faleh Abood Umara, two oil worker union leaders from the southern Iraqi city of Basra. Visiting Seattle with the King County Labor Council yesterday, the two men had no doubt about what the United States can do next to help their country recover from the reign of Saddam Hussein, whom Awad refers to as "a criminal, in capital letters."

The occupation, they believe, must end. And withdrawal must be followed by a massive rebuilding of Iraq's infrastructure, with U.S. support.

<snip>

Awad and Umara, who had a cousin executed by the deposed dictator, have no doubt that their country can do better at governing and reuniting itself if the United States were to leave immediately. They could be naïve or wrong. But they think that it is the United States that is being misled, again, with the talk of fighting jihadists on their soil. If the United States has good intentions toward Iraq, we must ask ourselves -- and Iraqis -- what the overall effect of occupation is on the Iraqi people.

[LiberalAndProud]

1. Terms for peace?

The occupation, they believe, must end. And withdrawal must be followed by a massive rebuilding of Iraq's infrastructure, with U.S. support

I could live with it.

[Erika]

2. But our own infrastructure is going to hell

How do you reconcile that?

[weldon berger]

3. If we weren't spending $5 billion/month blowing up Iraq,

we could afford both. Of course with this administration Iraq'd get reconstruction money and the Bush Pioneers would get another tax cut so it's pretty much moot, but theoretically it could work.

[LiberalAndProud]

4. Moral obligation?

I have a real problem with the notion that we can invade a country, blow the existing infrastructure into the next millenium and walk away because "we got our own problems".

I truly believe we have to fix what we broke, beyond obligation -- this is a moral imperative.

[indepat]

5. That the driving force has or ever will be improving, protecting, and

respecting lives of the Iraqi people is a hilariously laughably and profound absurdity of the highest magnitude and possibly among the most ridiculous concepts ever conceived by man.