Mistakes acknowledged; hubris maintained

I was invited to be a member of INtake Weekly's blogsquad. INtake is a newspaper published here in Indianapolis that focuses on lifestyle, entertainment, and news issues for the twenty and thirty-something demographic. It's a pretty cool paper and I'm glad to have the opportunity to be one of the bloggers. They have a weekly prompt for us to write about and I plan to cross-post them here (tagged: blogsquad). Here's the first one:

Mistakes acknowledged; hubris maintained

The Iraq War... nothing like a nice, easy topic to settle into a new weblog with.

So hello everyone, my name is Gregor and I have been opposed to the Iraq War since before it began. My reasons are varied and to discuss them fully would take up far too much time and be far too boring for most. Plus I'm tired of discussing it online. I have blogged and forumed enough about it already. Suffice it to say my reasons can be summarized as:

• I do not believe in or support nation-building. I wholeheartedly embrace the Jeffersonian principle of “peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations – entangling alliances with none.”
• I do not believe Iraq ever posed a legitimate – much less imminent – threat to America. I believe the Iraq War falls quite short of justification (archived) by the “Just War Theory”.
• I do not believe in “wars” on tactics or things (e.g. “War on Terror”, “War on Drugs”, or “War on Poverty”). They are impossible to win and only result in more centralized power.

Today's topic is Bush's new vision for Iraq, which includes sending about 20,000 more troops. I believe this is the wrong direction for the troops to be going. I do not buy the “whether the decision was right or not, we're there now so we need to fix it” line of argument. A lot of the problems in the Middle East have arisen because of other nations sticking their nose where it does not belong, trying to “fix” things. Perhaps thinking they can “fix” things in the first place is their biggest problem. I believe it's called hubris.

The different religious sects in Iraq are not very likely to “play nice” with each other. If they want to split into a few different nations, then let them. Sure, if you want to control the entire country in a totalitarian fashion, maybe they could all get along. That goes against this alleged notion of Iraq being a “free” country, though, and looks a lot more like life was under Saddam Hussein.

I have no illusions that withdrawal from Iraq will make the situation there all rosy. I'm not convinced we're making the situation better, though, and since I do not believe we should have been there to begin with, do not support furthering the mistake by staying longer. Bush took responsibility for “where mistakes have been made”. Good. I wonder if that includes all the lies (archived) that led up to the war. Either way, if he himself wants to fix the mistakes, he's welcome to try.

...just not with other people's money – or troops who signed up to defend this nation – thank you.

This article was originally published on INtake Blogsquad (archived).