...and what comes to mind is a certain warmth, a certain satisfaction. I'm not sure why, but their willfully ignorant childishly naive overriding self-righteousness makes me smile. Long have I felt that were I a demon assigned to subversion of the world and seduction to sin, I'd be on permanent vacation. Given that I act for the opposite aims, I seem to have a guaranteed job for all eternity. The need for the human race to learn is unending and their ignorance boundless. There is no end to their ability to fail.
Freedom to what? Freedom from what? Right to what? Right to be what from what? When the terms of indignation are left undefined all their claims devolve to angry cries of gibberish for gibberish is exactly that which has no meaning, the same meaning they've failed to assign to anything through reason whether intellectual or emotional.
Nothing they say means anything. Anything they say reeks of meaninglessness. The entire thing is one large pile of drivel.
Take for instance our man Bareback O'Rama's desire to get out of Iraq before Iraq's current leadership wants us to, as if merely leaving would make it all as if we never went there at all, as if you could turn back the clock through pretending nothing ever happened.
We walked away from Viet Nam and essentially embargoed them and they sat fretting and fuming and simmering down within the Communist bloc, but does anyone truly think that they believe it never happened? I assure you, many are those yet living who lost family no longer living to that war and have not forgotten. In fact, it was likely only that North Viet Nam was seeking more to conquer South Viet Nam than anything else which worked in favor of our walking away not turning into a return engagement later on.
The North cynically manipulated the Viet Cong into smashing their best blood and spirit upon the American shields, wasting and running out their resources, during the Tet Offensive. At that point, it was clear to the South Viet Nam Communists that the North was not interested in a Communist worker's paradise in general as a North Vietnamese hegemony specifically above all else. The South would be theirs and that was their chief aim.
We let the North have their way and the South settled down to a unification on the North's terms. The South seeing the realpolitik of the situation had considerably less fervor for their cause in Communism now.
If we leave Iraq now, most Iraqis will blame us and rightfully so for destabilizing them for no reason that anyone can justify, and then failing to restabilize them back to at least close to the level they enjoyed somewhat dubiously under Saddam Hussein. What do you think the result of that could possibly be?
Further, whereas Saddam kept Islamic extremism at bay through unmitigated violent oppression, we will fail to do so by walking away as long as those parties remain at large and operating freely in defiance of the world's supposed desire for peace. Notice that the loopy left at the Democratic Convention is solidly obsessed with what happened in the past. We invaded Iraq on George Bush's say so. Past tense. Happened several years ago. What are we seeing as a result now? Would Iraq be better off simply by walking away? Obviously not, but the reality of having to deal with the aftermath of the actions of others has never stopped people from acting short-sightedly in self-righteous moral indignation. Never have humans been ones to put the realities of the world ahead of their petty tantrums and make no mistake the cacophony of calls to leave Iraq now now now are nothing more than tantrums as every last party calling for immediate withdrawal have no coherent, rational, or even remotely sane idea of what to do after that and more to the point, what the Iraqi people deserve in compensation given that we invaded.
The insurgency is not about Iraq being for Iraqis. Iraq is already for Iraqis and more than ever it was under Hussein. Unless democracy is so distrusted by the left (and it is, more than anyone wants to believe) or that non-Americans (read non-whites) are fundamentally incompatible with the group self-determination of representative democracy (and they do fundamentally believe such a bigoted thing that certain kinds of people tend towards certain kinds of civilization organizational structures) then they should be cognizant immediately that the Iraqi people are more free now than they have ever been before. So free, that many of them are free to destabilize their nation through acts of violent barbarism against their own countrymen.
No, this is not about Iraq being for Iraqis in which case our walking away would allow them to do whatever it is Iraqis want to do with Iraq such as turning it into another Arab nationwide gulag as it was under Hussein or a middle-eastern den of hedonistic pursuit such as had never existed in the east after or before Islam. This insurgency is about a fight from the forces of extremist Islam who want to take every verse in the Koran literally which in any way fits their victimhood driven run from self-reliance and self-responsibility and their desire to blame their problems real and more often imagined on everyone else, most especially as is common with humans, those who have more anything than they do.
Witness the Law of the Sea treaty which is all about making sure that a cut of any and all profits is made to every single land-locked nation but especially the non-Western nations, out of all proportion to the input of said nations. It is about selfishness, and abdication of responsibility, personal power, and reason. It is about no better or noble a greed than those they impugn. Nothing is stopping landlocked nations from fielding oceanologists and other related disciplinarians to multi-national projects, but I guess putting up or shutting up is also not a human tendency.
If we walk away now, the reality is that we will deliver Iraq into a religious nuthatchery worse than Iran in the heady and bloody aftermath of the revolution, worse than Saudi Arabia when the royal family is having a bad day, worse than any we've yet seen. The most extremist kannoim of the uber Orthodox Jewish world could not be a millionth as nasty as it will be. The Catholic Church during the Dark Ages will be a close match. In other words, those who would walk away in indignation over the actions of the Bush administration are willing to visit on the Iraqi people in the wake of that supposed wrong already done on them, the worse wrong of allowing the imposition of a religious fundamentalist state of oppression of the sort they themselves scream righteous blather against whenever they even fantasize that it might be creeping upon the US from the Christian right.
Those who would leave Iraq right now, would victimize the Iraqis all over again for their own self-righteousness.
As I said. Ignorant, senseless, barbaric, that is the nature of self-righteousness in the end. That is what the left is proposing visiting upon those who they claim have already been victimized. How is that more right for them to do than it is for those they oppose? It isn't, but self-righteousness blinds people to that equality of evil in acting the same as those they oppose. To have never invaded would have been nice, but imagining that we can make the world as if it never happened after all the destruction we wrought and all the established patterns and flows of societal power we disrupted is tantamount of utter idiocy and the result will be to victimize Iraq well and truly.
It will be to put the truth rather than the lie to the claim that we Americans can start trouble, but not finish it. All it takes to do it, is to allow Iraq to go from a secular dictatorship to a religious one. All it takes is to allow Iraq to suffer under a fate we ourselves would never allow our own kind to.
That is racism. That is bigotry. That is wrong. The left is wrong.
Truly, my job will never be finished.
