The Plain and Persuasive Case for Getting Out of Iraq Now  
by Dennis Rahkonen
www.dissidentvoice.org
November 20, 2006



 

A typical day in Iraq will see two or three U.S. troops and dozens of Iraqis killed. 
 
That day will be followed by many more of the same. 
 
All because our government leaders cling to the nationalistic vanity of futilely seeking to “win” a despicable war that’s absolutely wrong and utterly indefensible by universally accepted standards. 
 
Meanwhile, antiwar activists chant “Peace, now!” in our streets. 
 
They do so because peace deferred means indefinite death, terrible dismemberment, and long years of suicide inducing Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. 
 
Many more Americans who served in Vietnam committed suicide, after returning home, than were actually killed in combat. 
 
That grim reality should haunt us all during uneasy, pensive moments before our nightly sleep. 
 
How do we exit Iraq?  There’s only one correct way. 
 
By loading departing ships and planes with our sons and daughters, immediately, not six, twelve, or eighteen horrendous months later. 
 
To those who say we can’t let Iraq join Vietnam, Lebanon and Somalia in a string of humiliating U.S. defeats that cumulatively expose us as a paper tiger, there are two emphatic answers: 
 
“That train has already left the station.” 
 
“You were the ones who put the locomotive on the tracks in the first place.” 
 
We can’t let habitual incompetents, oblivious to reality, continue repeating policies that never had any possible outcome but disaster. 
 
Not unless we want American youth, still frolicking on the playgrounds of carefree childhood, to become roadside-bomb fodder in perpetual wars tomorrow. 
 
But what about the “chaos” and “anarchy” that would supposedly follow if we left “too soon”? 
 
Even if they materialized -- which never occurred after finally leaving Vietnam -- how could things get any worse than what our occupation is responsible for having stirred up already? 
 
The Iraqi people, who ran their civilization nicely for thousands of years before our country was formed, will order their own affairs much better than if we foolishly stick around -- saturating the sand with everybody’s blood -- arrogantly trying to do the job for them. 
 
Besides, Republicans are completely two-faced on this score. 
 
Right after the “Black Hawk Down” incident in Somalia, prominent GOP leaders loudly called for immediately pulling our troops from that country. 
 
Their advocacy of cutting and running was so intense that one wag called it “severing and sprinting.” 
 
Now, when confronted with their own administration’s far greater disaster in Iraq, Republicans apparently want to remain there forever. That’s how long we’d still be chasing impossible victory, at the unacceptable cost of thousands of wasted U.S. lives. 
 
Not to mention a virtual genocide endured by the Iraqis. 
 
Let’s leave Iraq, and use the billions being squandered there on programs that would benefit our own populace.  Affordable, national health care for all U.S. kids would be a good start. 
 
Some political figures advocate “redeployment” or “withdrawal” in successive, delayed stages.  Such a false solution isn’t morally appropriate. 
 
Dwight Eisenhower admitted in his memoirs that the Vietnam War was actually fought to acquire Southeast Asia’s “tin, tungsten and rubber.” 
 
There was no nobility in America’s purpose back then, just as our occupying presence in Iraq is totally bereft of any righteous, redeeming cause. 
 
It’s all about achieving oil “access” and heavy-handed U.S. control in the region.  Wall Street profiteering is the operative motive factor, not any genuine concern for the Iraqi people’s well being or right to self-determination. 
 
In other words, it’s foreign policy reduced through abject greed and power hunger to an equivalent of violent rape. 
 
In cases of rape, demand an immediate pullout, not a phased, negotiated withdrawal. 
 
Also, staying longer than objectivity allows would almost certainly result in disaster. 
 
There are no viable options for us. Nothing will magically transform Bush’s wretched war into something worthy or successful. 
 
In another part of the world, decades ago, blindly patriotic false pride doomed a similarly misbegotten French intervention to crushing catastrophe. 
 
Policy makers in Paris, so stubbornly like our own today, didn’t have the sense to depart Indochina while they still could. 
 
Before Dien Bien Phu. 
 
Let’s not make the mistake of garrisoning our troops in isolated outposts, any one of which could tragically become our own, relentlessly assaulted Dien Bien Phu. 
 
Everyone needs to face facts. 
 
We’ve already lost in Iraq. 
 
Forced to choose between cutting and running and watching their precious children get cut to pieces in a murderous debacle without end, American parents will opt -- have already opted -- for the former. 
 
Their capacity to endure senseless sacrifice is far weaker than the Iraqi insurgents’ iron will to battle however long it takes to repel hated foreigners from their violated homeland. 
 
Any honest way we look at it, the handwriting is clearly on the wall. 
 
It’s over. 
 
Bring the troops home, now. 
 
Dennis Rahkonen, from Superior, Wisconsin, was a regional coordinator for the People’s Coalition for Peace and Justice during the early ‘70s.

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