Three Days Left

With only three (less actually) days left in the current administration, I wanted to take this time to point out the good that can come from the Iraq war. No, it's not that the people are now safer than they were before we invaded, because they aren't. With years, if not decades of sectarian violence ahead of us, no one can say the people are better off without feeling at least a little guilt. It's not that the infrastructure of the country is better than it was before the fall, since the last few vestiges of said infrastructure were destroyed in the first few weeks of the conflict and are only now seeing serious rebuilding. It's not that the Christians of the country are safer. They are being forced to flee the country. No, the good that can come from the conflict is in the form of a lesson to for the United States, a lesson we should have learned after Vietnam. The US can not claim to be able to cure the ills of the earth through violence. It does not work.

The planet is less safe now than before we spent over a trillion dollars fighting a war half the world away. Deaths from terrorism have increased. The number of civilians dead as a direct result of our intervention in Iraq may be higher than those killed in over two decades of rule by Saddam (I say "may" because no one knows the exact figures). Going forward, I hope that my country, and specifically certain elements within her, take head that while we may have the most powerful military in the world, it is a waste of resources to try to bully the rest of the world into behaving the way we want them to behave. An analogy: a teacher wants a bully to stop making the other children in the classroom give him his lunch money by hitting them, so the teacher hits the bully. What is the end result? The teacher has demonstrated to the bully that it is acceptable to use the overwhelming force one has by virtue of size to make other people behave in a certain way. A better approach is by non-threatening behavior and a demonstration by the teacher that that through non-violent means, such as time-outs or removal of recess privileges, one can attain their desired results. I'm stretching the analogy. I got caught up in it, but I think my point is clear. We cannot continue to tell the rest of the world that the US is the greatest country in the world and yet detain in prison a higher percent of our population than any other western country. We cannot neglect the welfare of our children by condemning them to lifelong poverty and then tell other countries they must do more for their young. Likewise, education and health care can no longer be neglected. Iraq can teach us the way to regain our moral authority, if we admit its failure and work to improve the lives of our citizens and our image abroad.