Here.

Before we accept your premise, you must define (1) what positive, realistic goal you wish to achieve and (2) how we can pragmatically achieve it.

 Is that the royal "we" you're employing, or are you speaking for everyone here at TPM Café? Just curious.

  I do not know that it is an impossible situation, any more than I know for sure that there is a short or long-term "good" solution. Sometimes you just have to try to do what's best, and rely on as many others as you need to in order to best navigate the situation. Looking at me and saying that I should be able to tell you "how we can pragmatically achieve" such a goal is... well, silly. I'm not a maker of foreign policy or some sort of key player. I'm sure for some folks that means I should shut up, but then most of them should, too, if that's the criterion for being able to express an opinion.

 As for having to answer to God, well, I'm an agnostic... but I believe in flesh and blood reality and in the sanctity of others' lives, their autonomy, their basic human rights. So at the very least, I think we owe it to the people of Iraq to find out from them what it is they want. Point being, charity and respect are the least we can offer. So shouldn't we at least try to give them that much? If they want us all to get the hell out and never darken their door again, then we need to back the hell off and give them space. How that translates into the real world brass tacks of reconstruction, I don't know. Maybe, though, someone does. Or perhaps someone can at least explain to me why it is we need to do something else, without platitudes, self-serving predictions or whatever form of puffery.

What were you taught about your moral responsibility for killing innocent people? If your conduct was unintentionally killing thousands of innocent people every month, what would your personal responsibility be? Would you stop whatever it is you were doing that resulted in so many deaths?

 I assume that's rhetorical, yeah? I grew up in America, was told that murder is wrong, that sometimes people go to war but that we should avoid it if possible, that you should do your best to find and support truth and justice, and that you have God to answer to for whatever you choose to do.

 Now I'm much older, and I know (for myself) that life often makes simple truths complicated. Black and white is for kids; the adults get all the grays they can handle, if not more. I am against the military occupation of any nation whose people are not quite vocally demanding it for their own protection, and then I believe it's something the U.N. should be first in on. Then again, however, I have certainly seen Hotel Rwanda and plenty of documentary coverage. So I don't think it's going to be peaches and sunlights just because, all right?

 I offer my comments not as well-honed solutions but as expressions of my informed opinion. I remain open to education, and I would never claim to be free of blind spots or ignorance. If you have something constructive to say, I welcome it.

Posted at June 3, 2005 7:13 PM in response to The Central Political Question

Please read my second comment, wherein I take the other point of view, that being that we ought to leave.

 I am absolutely not for committing/condemning any more lives to the insanity of our military occupation. Personally, I think we're involved in an illegal campaign in Iraq, and we're doing our troops dirty.

 What I hoped to accomplish by posting either of my previous comments to this piece is to point out the clashing issues at the heart of the question, "Should we stay or should we go". You don't need to convince me that it's a mess, nor do you need to convince me that the loss of life (be it a coalition member's or an Iraqi citizen's life) is truly sad.

 I trust that the American people can, if given the facts and motivated by a sense of moral obligation to others, arrive at some solution. Whether it's ultimately a good one or not will take time to tell. Whether or not I believe the American people can be given the facts and proper motivation... I'm not saying. I hope to have my deeply ingrained cynicism proved wrong.

 I am also concerned that, should we withdraw from Iraq in a less than conscientious and sound fashion, we will wind up creating a legacy that will haunt our progeny and theirs for years to come. The good people of Iraq, I believe, would sooner see the citizens of the United States attempt in some way to do good by them than abandon them to the fundamentalists and jihadists.

 By abdicating responsibility and simply blaming the Bushies, the American people would show themselves to be irresponsible. It's a dank, dark, deep hole we've seen dug over the last few years, but if we don't attempt to extricate ourselves from it, and help the Iraqi people, then what can we say of ourselves? "Sure, those soldiers were there with my country's flag. Sure they were talking about how we did all this for the people of Iraq. Sure, my tax dollars helped fund it all. But it was Bush who did it! I didn't vote for Bush so it's not my fault! Sorry -- but I can't help you"?

In other words, we have to leave but we have to stay. Period. Such is the consternation sown by an implacable, monstrous conundrum. I don't like it any more than you do.

Posted at June 3, 2005 11:44 AM in response to The Central Political Question

Or... "What I also could have said..."

Why do we "have to leave"? We have to leave because we don't belong in the middle of the Iraqi people's collective life. It's like a really bad relationship based on an intervention that was itself an excuse to get close to something we coveted. Call it "oil", or call it a bullet-pointed goal serving the Dominionist agenda. Call it whatever you like. In the end, though, realize that we had no good reason to go there, let alone to do what we did to the country. (Which country? Right.)

 As an American who, like the majority of Americans, did not vote for Dubya either time, and as someone who has been reading everything from Josh Marshall's blog and the CJR Campaign Desk to Daily Kos and Crooked Timber, and as a person who has cried a number of times over the news out of Iraq and the pictures no one wants to see, and as a guy who also regularly reads Informed Comment (and who thinks it's worth recommending to others), I believe it's fair to say that we need to figure out how best to withdraw from Iraq in the least damaging way possible -- though, at the risk of being crass, I must say it's rather like an elephant withdrawing from a scapegoat's behind (there's just no easy way to do it, and it's going to be ugly no matter what).

  We are collectively responsible for one hell of a mess. We owe it to the people of Iraq -- for whom we are (as of this date!) ostensibly "there" -- to do what's best for them. The situation is not that easy to figure out, of course, what with the imminent civil war and all the chaos of various power plays going on, but one thing is certain: we're not helping matters by maintaining a military presence (smelling of our own nationalism) in a country we so rather poorly "liberated" from the would-be man we ourselves (long story short) put in power.

 Our continuing to be there is only further inflaming the already simmering contempt we've managed to brew in the Muslim world. Someone really needs to sit so-called President "Gee, Dubya" Bush down and tell the muddled frat boy that treating Iraq like we're a gung-ho corporate raider nation funded along the way by Saudi venture capitalists and other rogue corporate interests is just not winning us any friends or good will. Oh, too, Mister Bush? -- having a picture on a U.S. dot mil website of a tank with "New Testament" written on its barrel is just stupidly unconscionable, and belies the idea that your use of the word "crusade" was any way a mistake.

 We need to leave Iraq to the Iraqis, and we need to do it in a way that shows nothing but good will for its future as a sovereign nation of autonomous peoples deserving self-rule free from the interference of a gluttonous, currently decadent, superpower.

 For further examples of why getting out of Iraq is problematic on a number of levels and must be carefully done, please visit RAWA.org.

Posted at June 3, 2005 11:02 AM in response to The Central Political Question

Why do we "have to stay"? We have to stay because my mother said so. When I was growing up, you didn't make a mess and walk away from it, even if you felt like it wasn't your fault because you had not intended to make the mess in the first place. It didn't matter what you had thought or intended, in other words. You had to stay because you were responsible, and you were responsible because irresponsibility was not an option. You never, ever wanted someone else to do the job you were responsible for, because that would look very bad for you. And you sure as hell didn't want to try to pass the buck, put the blame for your mess on someone else's shoulders, because that was worse than being merely irresponsible -- that was being downright immoral.

 Now, I think that when it comes to Dubya, such early childhood lessons are useful. Barbara apparently dropped the ball on the whole responsibility thing, although she's trying to make up for it with The Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy, in whose mission statement it states that "the home is the child's first school, [and] the parent is the child's first teacher". Of course, it doesn't help us now with George W., the man who most desperately needs to read up on what's going on and stop trusting his flunkies to read it to him. I'm kidding, naturally. We all know that he knows damn well what's going on. It's just that he doesn't feel responsible for it. God is responsible for it. The terrorists are responsible. Someone else is responsible. Dubya is just bumbling along singing "Doo-da, doo-da..." and trusting that somehow, some way, someone else will clean up the mess or else he'll be out of office so who cares? He'll have done what Rove, Cheney, Wolfowitz, et al. wanted him to do, after all. Which kind of makes them responsible, right? Nudge-nudge, wink-wink.

 Yeah, well, you know what? Maybe "We the People" ought to consider ourselves responsible for getting Dubya all over Liberty's blue-green shoe. Maybe we ought to consider that, complicit or not in the schemes and stratagems of the erstwhile Leader of the Free World (if not its "Internets"), it's become our mess, too, this mess in beleaguered Iraq. Maybe we should simply accept the fact that, one way or another, we have a moral obligation now, as a nation of voting people, to stay, to help, to do something positive for the people of Iraq. Because, like it or not, we're living in the zone of responsibility, the lot of us. And if we don't think its our fault that the mess exists, well, we can discuss how to avoid such messes in future -- as we clean up this one.

 I am a proud liberal. I grew up reading a lot. One thing I learned from all that reading is that my mother was right about being responsible or facing the negative consequences of having chosen to be irresponsible. For those who want to see this moral play enacted on the international stage (with audience participation, expected or not), please stay tuned to numerous news sources.

Posted at June 3, 2005 9:18 AM in response to The Central Political Question

Posted at June 1, 2005 10:26 AM in response to The more I watch Bush on TV these days, the lighter my heart becomes.