Considering Jay Nargundkar’s Feb. 19 praise of all the wonders the U.S. has done in Iraq in the last few years (“Iraq: Should we stay?”) will likely galvanize quite a few responses from the majority of students who realize how ridiculous an assessment it is to characterize Iraq as a “noble mission,” I would like to be among the first to offer an opinion. Considering Tim Hiller’s companion column (“… Or should we go now?”) clearly articulates why this noble mission has always been a complete guise for political exploitation and corporate plunder, it would be far more useful to concentrate on the one of Nargundkar’s points that relates most to the ordinary, average American citizen.
Nargundkar states, “Unconditionally withdrawing from Iraq now would be a betrayal of the Iraqi people and a confirmation to our country’s enemies that we lack the stomach for a real fight.” Never mind that America has made it a tradition of betraying different entities that we decide to prop up in just about every sphere of the world, including the Iraqi Shiites and Kurds several times in the past 30 years, or that our presence in Iraq has never taken into consideration the interests or welfare of the Iraqi people. In Nargundkar’s statement, more importantly, is the belief that removing our troops from Iraq before the “job is done” puts our nation at greater risk from our enemies, who will presumably use our unwillingness to continue a fight as a pretense to either attack or take advantage of our military weakness.
While one may have assumed that anyone intelligent enough to read and write would recognize how ridiculous and deceptive this idea is, apparently it still needs to be elaborated. First and most blatantly obvious is that the war in Iraq has stretched our military almost to a breaking point, which anybody who follows the news regularly can attest to, and it has been confirmed by some top generals. Both our active and reserve forces have been so used and depleted that we may not be able to respond to an attack from another country. Thanks to the war in Iraq, our nation was unable to adequately respond to the dire needs of its own citizens during Hurricane Katrina, a disaster that would be exponentially greater to American citizens if it were a war. The idea behind military deterrence lies in possessing a strong, well-equipped and ready reserve force, which now exists only in our advanced long-range weaponry, which is not only a precarious deterrence but also one that would precipitate a similar response from our enemies, putting far more citizens in danger.
Moreover, the idea that the Iraq debacle has demonstrated our military weakness is equally absurd. Our failures in the region are political, not military. We are supporting a factionalized government that simply has no popular support or legitimacy, and this cannot be solved through further military action. We may have seen in recent weeks that the military can elicit a brief respite in violence through bribing certain factions, but in the end, when the Iraqis try to rebuild their decimated civil infrastructure, they will have to cope with more than 4 million refugees (2 million inner-displaced Iraqis alone, and more than 2 million residing abroad). Other nations recognize that there is no military solution to this conflict, which is why they will not see our inability to restore peace to Iraq as a reason to initiate a conflict with us, but as long as we stay, we are vulnerable both in the region and at home.
Lastly, the same ludicrous notion that failure to achieve absolute victory abroad will destabilize the whole region and usher in our own demise was precisely the same logic used by the politicians during the Vietnam War. Much like Iraq, we were propping up a government that had no base support. Which, despite our military and tactical victories, not to mention nine years of internecine bombings and invasions, was still unable to attain victory. Nevertheless, our loss in Vietnam did not destabilize the region, did not bring about our imminent destruction at the hands of communism and did not entice any of our enemies to attack us.
Our presence in Iraq has done nothing for the security of either the Iraqis or ourselves except make it worse, which is something that should be apparent to all of us by now. How an able-bodied college student can support a war that has cost America so many lives yet not volunteer for it is beyond me. Either way, Iraq has been given a chance, and it is about time everyone on campuses across the country take a lesson from our parents’ generation to ignore the lies and misconceptions and work to stop it as soon as possible.
Scott Ratner is a junior government and politics major. He can be reached at sratner@umd.edu.
