the world, or part of it

Now that everyone is sick of this forsaken war in Iraq, I thought that I would go back and see what America and the government felt before it all started. I was still a little young to fully grasp it, so my research has brought up a few points that I didn’t realize or didn’t remember from back then. My impression now and then was that it was more of an emotionally charged enterance to Iraq. We sat on the brink for a while, but when American, Britain, and other troops crossed the borders of the country, we fell into figurative quicksand that we cant get out of.

I found a CNN headline dated October 11, 2002: ” In a major victory for the White House, the Senate early Friday voted 77-23 to authorize President Bush to attack Iraq if Saddam Hussein refuses to give up weapons of mass destruction as required by U.N. resolutions. “. Why was the support so strong back then whilst it is so weak today? Is it because it was politcally popular to back the war, because we were still smarting from 9/11, or because we did not realize that the bodies would pile up and it would become a repeat of Vietnam? I guess people just wanted to stay and office and not be tagged as “un-American” if they did not support the war. The good news is, the time when one was called un-American for opposing the war is over. The bad news, the war is still going on, and only recently has there seemed to be an end in sight. In the past few months, Congress has really been stepping it up in terms of calling for a pullout in the country. Sadly, the plans for a pullout are longterm and incomplete. Just leaving Iraq all at once would be an international disaster, but these three-year plans are just too long. What needs to be done is to step up training for the Iraqi army so they have a way to protect themselves while are troops leave the country more rapidly.

In the pre-war passionate debates, no one on the hawk side had any plan for an exit, and no one on the dove side questioned the issue. America needs to stand up now and correct the mistakes we made in 2002 and 2003 before we entered Iraq. In three weeks, Sadaam was out of power, but the lack of stability there makes me wonder why things can not be done in addition to the new curfews to keep law and order there. I’ve tried to keep my weblog clear of my comments on the war because I tend to branch off (which I’ve probably did here) and not finish a story. All this branching off is trying to get back to the point that Washington needs to realize the error of their ways and fix it before we slip any deeper in the sands of Iraq