We live in peculiar times.
The U.S. military has been in Iraq for nearly two years now. About 1,500 soldiers and Marines have died since the invasion in March 2003. There is no end in sight to either the American occupation or the Iraqi insurgency.
Yet here at home, Americans have taken one of three approaches to the war. Unless a close friend or family member is in the military, Americans are unequivocally against the war, defiantly say that everything we are doing in Iraq is for all the right reasons or are doing their best to ignore the entire situation.
I can't speak to the dispassionate non-observer. I will not pretend to understand why some people have ignored what might be the defining foreign policy issue of the post-Cold War era. Even though President Bush is trying his absolute best to keep Americans ignorant of the specifics of our disputes in the Middle East, people's interests should be piqued by skyrocketing gas prices and pictures of suicide bombings on the front page of the newspapers. But I digress.
The other schools of thought on Iraq, however, are also misplaced. The United States is firmly entrenched in Iraq for the foreseeable future. Even the most vehement anti-war voices in our government, such as Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., are not calling for a full withdrawal of the troops, because such a withdrawal would probably create total chaos.
The Bush administration has firmly interwoven Iraq's fate with the success of the American operation there and, like it or not, there is no turning back now.
Granted, the administration used what were, in the minds of many, sketchy means to gain support for the war. No weapons of mass destruction have been found and no firm link between Saddam Hussein's government and al-Qaida has been established.
This does not mean, however, that nothing good has come out of the Iraq war. Pro-democracy movements have sprung up in Egypt and Lebanon. The new, democratically-elected Palestinian government seems to be serious enough about making peace with Israel that Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, himself a war monger, is taking major steps toward a settlement.
So judge not, ye naysayers. Bush may never have been justified in invading Iraq in the first place, but some good seems to have come out of it.
On the other hand, while there is promise of a Middle Eastern democracy movement, there are many reasons to be worried about how our invasion of Iraq might play out. Iran is well on its way to possessing nuclear weapons (if it does not have them already), and it is getting support from our old nemesis, Russia. The United States is looking very hypocritical to countries like China and Pakistan, who have questionable human rights records but who point to the United States' treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib as evidence that they should not have to change their own policies.
So judge not, ye supporters of the war. There may be some promising democratic movements in the Middle East, but the threat of nuclear war has not been this great since the fall of the Soviet Union 15 years ago. Also, terrorist cells have the opportunity to recruit young people to their cause with some fresh new rhetoric.
The fact is that the American operation in Iraq is a work in progress, and we have the next move. The United States has historically supported authoritarian governments in the Middle East provided they furnished us with a favorable environment for trade and allied with us instead of the Soviet Union. In order to truly affect positive change, it is necessary that the Bush administration stop creating double standards on international cooperation and its support for democracy without burning bridges with countries that have traditionally been our allies.
This is a tough road to take, and one the administration seems to have trouble even trying to walk on. But, whatever the original reason for the invasion of Iraq, if democracies start to spring up in the Middle East, supporters of the Iraq War will be vindicated. If, on the other hand, democracy does not take hold, there will be more instability in the Middle East than there has been in decades.
This does not mean more military action is necessary; in fact, it would be counterproductive. However, it is undeniable that news of a successful Iraqi election-however flawed it might have been-lit a spark under reform movements throughout the region.
I personally never felt the invasion of Iraq was a good idea. The reasons the Bush administration gave the American people for the invasion never seemed fully legitimate or fully in line with what the foreign policy thinkers in the administration actually thought.
But now that we are in, we really can't get out until we either succeed or fail in the objective of spreading democracy in the Middle East. The United States is built on principles of freedom and fairness. The key is that those principles spread around the region, as they have already started to do, without further American military involvement.
Success could bring unprecedented peace and prosperity to what has been, along with sub-Saharan Africa, the most unstable region in the world since the end of World War II. Failure could result in major terrorist activity or even a nuclear attack.
So people in all camps on the war need to unite and realize that the only reasonable next step is to succeed. It is a gamble that the administration has forced this country to take, and it is a gamble that the administration itself might not fully understand. But it is a gamble that, for the safety of the entire world, must yield a lucrative payout.
Otherwise, 1,500 of our finest, bravest and brightest men and women will have died for nothing.
