The Iraq War

My original reason for starting this blog was to talk about Bush and the war in Iraq, and yet every time I logged on, I felt overwhelmed by every thing I wanted to say. However, time and thought have caused a couple of things to crystallize in my head, so I'm going to start with them. At this time, I'm not going to go into whether or not I thought the war was justified. That's a topic for another time. Instead, I'm just going to focus on a couple of things that I thought were done wrong.

First and foremost, the work to rebuild Iraq should have gone first to the Iraqis, not to foreign companies like Halliburton, and certainly not to U.S. companies that the Vice President used to work for. Nothing breeds contentment like prosperity. If the Iraqis are prospering, they will have a vested interest in keeping the peace. If the U.S. had done this, instead of trying to steal Iraqi oil money through forced reconstruction projects, then we would have peace in Iraq today!

This is the single biggest mistake that the Bush administration has made. I don't have any evidence to back this up, but I suspect that Bush promised a lot of people fat reconstruction contracts if they supported the war, all paid for by Iraqi oil. That is why the military's first priority was to secure the oil wells and repair them.

Second, our military is trained in how to conduct warfare, not how to rebuild a nation. If we're going to get into the business of rebuilding nations, we need to learn how to do this right. Once the war was declared won, the military should have begun to pull back, and another group should have come in. A group that was trained in how to rebuild nations.

Such a group is going to have to be more of a police force than an army. Every member of this group that deals with the people needs to know the local language and customs. They're going to have to have rules that govern how they interact with the people, requiring things like search warrants to enter a person's house, and probable cause to arrest someone. They need to read people their rights when they are arrested.

Everyone who is arrested needs a lawyer, needs to face their accuser, etc. Everyone whose arrested needs someone monitoring their conditions who is on their side. Obviously this is a volatile situation, but the level of volatility will vary over time, and the rebuilding force needs to know how to adapt to that. The lives of our people need to be considered important, but the lives of innocent Iraqis should be considered just as important, and Iraqis, just like U.S. citizens, need to be considered innocent until they are proven guilty.

Third and last, I think the abuses in Iraq were inevitable. I don't know what the attitude is like among the soldiers in Iraq, but I know what the attitude is over here among people who support Bush and the war. A lot of people over here think that our boys can do no wrong. Whenever there's an allegation of abuse, they assume that the Iraqi person must have done something wrong, be an insurgent or something, to deserve what happened to them. The fact is that there are all kinds of people in our military, both good and bad, and if you give them the opportunity, the bad people are going to do bad things.

I'm also a little disappointed that it took pictures getting leaked to the public to get our government to do something about it. I've seen lots of stories in the blogs about people getting abused, from "Healing Iraq's" cousin who got killed, to the woman in Riverbend's post whose whole family was arrested because some neighbor had a grudge against them and filed a false report. This stuff shouldn't be news to anyone whose been paying attention, and I would like to think that our government is paying attention.

Finally, I don't understand why the first person to get punished for the abuses, is the guy who took the pictures, not the people who committed the abuses. Has anybody tried to justify that, or do they just think we're all too dumb to notice?