Stop the Insanity! Seriously!

I used to constantly try to convince my conservative friends that as much as I and other liberals hated the Iraq war and hated how it started, the majority of us were smart enough to realize that we need to remain in Iraq until the country is stabilized. Now I’ve drifted far enough to the right to comfortably call myself a conservative and I’ve found myself on the defensive, and it turns out I must have been wrong, because I can’t find anyone outside of the conservative movement who doesn’t think we should immediately withdraw troops from Iraq.

Is this really what we have come to as a country? We march up and down the street decrying the death caused by this war but we’re more than willing to abandon the Iraqi people to violent civil war (not to mention aggression from Iran). People, I plead with you, stop being pussies! Yes, I said ’stop being pussies!’ People die in war, its what happens, that does not make war inherently evil. Now whether this war was justified is a debate for another day; but regardless of the rational for war, regardless ineptitude of it’s execution, we owe it to the Iraqi to rebuild the infrastructure that we’ve destroyed. Even more, we owe it to them to protect their country until they can develop and maintain an effective government and a military that can maintain the peace.

What frustrates me the most is the way people will use the death toll in Iraq to argue that we should withdraw. I was watching Jack Cafferty reading viewer mail on CNN today and I couldn’t believe some of the things I heard. The question had been about McCain’s support of the war and the majority of the replies trashed him for supporting something Americans no longer support.What struck me were the comments about the ‘egregious loss of life’ as one writer put it. Egregious? Really? So far there have been less than 4000 U.S. deaths in the five year war; and less than 5000 in total. The United States lost more than 400,000 military personal in World War II; the total human loss of WWII, which includes soldiers and civilians on both sides, is estimated at over 70 million.

So here’s my message again: suck it up America! Please, stop screaming ‘no blood for oil’, and stop using the memory of dead soldiers to oppose the cause they died for; grow some balls, buck up and let’s do what needs to be done, and THEN let’s bring the troops home.

If you think this war was a political or strategic mistake I can deal with that, and I’m more than willing to debate with you on that point. But to point to the death toll of the war, which is one of the lowest death tolls for any war America has ever waged, and call it egregious is to blatantly use the death of soldiers to manipulate people into abandoning the cause those soldiers died for; and that is egregious.