After two years, the fruitless search for weapons of mass "distraction" has come to a close. Yes, the weapons; the central reason for the delugement of our troops in Iraq were not found. How can people say this man has moral values. It doesn't sound very Christian-like to me to lie to the public, have people killed for weapons which didn't exist, and make mistakes without admitting any fault at all. People mistakenly tend to associate moral values exclusively with issues of sexuality.
Thousands of our troops have died along with at least fifty of our journalists--not to mention all of the civilian deaths. The focus seemed to evade from the WMD and onto liberating the Iraqi's as the goal, thus putting little weight on the sole advertised reason for our troops placement there to begin with, or perhaps to justify our miscalculations. Apparently, the search ended almost a month ago but this information was just now made public. The reason the search was ended was because the minimal intelligence did not justify the risk of those searching. Shouldn't the same logic have been applied BEFORE we entered Iraq?
Those insurgents are labeled as freedom haters. If they don't like the fact that there are tanks & military personnel roaming their streets, they must "hate democracy" and that means we need to shove it down their throat whether they agree with it or not. People back home who feel that we were hastily brought into war are labeled as "unpatriotic." I see yellow ribbon stickers on every other car here that either read, "We Support Our Troops", and "We Support The Safe Return Of Our Troops." So any person who thinks that they shouldn't be there in the first place, or that this war was "the wrong war, at the wrong place & wrong time", must be ecstatic that they're there? Makes no sense at all.
Logic follows that if you really supported our troops, you'd want them to only be in a war that was thoroughly thought out, absolutely necessary, & properly managed, etc. Think about it. The determinant factor for war in Iraq has been basically proven to not exist. Some would say that the president made a mistake. I wouldn't call it that. A mistake would be something that was unintentionally brought about. This was a blantant, unabashed abuse of force based on dreams conjured up and manipulated to the American people for Bush's own political, religious, and some would say, moneterial agenda.
Before our troops went in there, our President told us that the Iraqi people would all greet us with open arms and basically throw roses at our feet when we made our "entrance", to put it subtly. But, that was not, and is not predominantly so. We were seen as an occupying force. And that we were and are. Why were they to trust us especially after the Abu Gharib scandal. That sure didn't put our superiors in the most positive light. How are they to believe that anything that the U.S. offers would be any different than what Sadaam offered. Hell, our next Attorney General directly set the tone for the mismanagement and abuses in that prison with his memo's quoting him as believing that certain provisions in the Geneva Convention are obsolete (because he said so) and approved a memo authorizing torture since his opinion in the memo stated that in order for torture to be called just that, the pain from an interrogation must include "injury such as death, organ failure, or serious impairment of body functions." Going by that, anything short of that cannot possibly be torture. That leaves a huge grey area and is what I feel set the stage for all of the mishandlings & incomprehensible behavior of our soldiers.
How are we going to deliver democracy to another nation if we battle with it everyday? How will they have fair elections in Iraq when our election process is so tainted itself? How can we act so pious when there are logs in our own eyes?
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