Political isolationism is the only legal policy for the United States Republic. Wars should only be defensive in nature and even then, must be declared by the congress, not by the president. The president committed treason by going to war without the approval of congress and he also violated the principles of federalism and international law by perpetuating an offensive war unilaterally.
The solution is an immediate removal of our troops to avoid further blowback and to hold officials accountable for regressive or illegal activity.
Our people missed an extremely important lesson from 9/11.
The attacks of 9/11 were not done because individuals hated our freedom, or were jealous of the way we live. 9/11 was blowback from our continued bullying, raiding and exploitation of the Middle East.
We need to stop pursuing international policy which leads to blowback and instead return to political isolationism. There is no solution to Iraq – the massive damage we have inflicted to the national infrastructure has crippled the ability of the nation to regenerate its losses, it is in a ungovernable state, solely because of the destructive military tactics we employed.
The modern country of Iraq’s borders were arbitrarily created by the British Mandate system of the inter-war period of the 1920s. Prior to the Iraq mandate the area was divided into several autonomous regions with tribal alliegances (Basra, Mosul etc). This political system worked. The British imposed an ungovernable system of unifying the entire region into one country. The result was chaos, only really brought under control by the heavy-fisted reign of Saddam.
I need to run to class, but as a final note, I think we should let the country disintegrate into whatever end will satisfy the population and REMOVE OURSELVES. Only Saddam was able to hold together Iraq, and we hung him. Without a charismatic, powerful leader who represents the collective will of the people, there will be no victory. Iraq needs a strong man to hold the country together or it needs to return to it’s original tribal divisions.
Pasting from a previous commentary I wrote:
Societies will always evolve organically to whatever end will satisfy its population.
Interrupting that natural chain of events (or even worse so, forcing your own morality and government upon an alien culture) unnaturally upsets the path of change. Internal problems should always be attended to internally with no influence from outside agents. The society will adapt to survive and maintain order. If the society cannot adapt it will collapse, and rightly, so that a new order may rise from the ashes of failure. When a dog is sick and can no longer perform it’s duties it must be put out of its misery. A order that cannot keep itself alive must be allowed to die. There is an illusion of health that is created by the interference of outside ‘peace keepers’ who decide to brace their backs against the collapsing roof. When these ‘heroes’ leave the dog once more cannot stand on its own and suffocates under its own decaying mass. But then an amazing thing happens: the soil is enriched by the rotting flesh and flowers begin to bloom upward through the rib cage. Soon a civilization exists on the skeleton of a diseased one that came before it.