The last two decades of U.S. foreign policy towards Iraq have been the epitome of immorality. Saddam Hussein was a barbaric and horrific person, but the truth of the matter is that the U.S. government funded, armed and bolstered the dictator Saddam for several years prior to 1990 because he happened to be fighting an “enemy” of the U.S.: Iran.

Even then, however, our “immoral” role in perpetuating the Iraq-Iran war had not elicited the wrath of the Iraqi people against the United States. It was only after Operation Desert Storm in 1991 and 13 years of debilitating US-led UN economic sanctions that the majority of the Iraqi people turned against America.

I still vividly remember when we first attacked Iraq in 1991. At the time, I attended a Muslim school just a few miles away from the Tyndall Air Force base in Panama City, Fla. While my peers, teachers and I spent those 43 days of Desert Storm mourning for the reckless loss of innocent life, nearly everyone else in our small city was celebrating our quick and “heroic” victory in Iraq.

As an American Muslim and the daughter of Arab immigrants, it was the first time I felt so disconnected from the rest of my society. How could the death and destruction of one people signal another people’s victory? Those succeeding months and, eventually, years were filled with bewilderment, pain and agony as I began to realize how misinformed many of my American peers were about the reality of conditions in Iraq and the Middle East as a whole. I also began to realize how desensitized we’ve become as an American people to the pain and suffering of others when they are separated from us by geography, race, or religion. Of course, the reverse can also be true, as I’ve encountered in some my visits to the Middle East.

Having spent my childhood summers in Jordan, I witnessed first-hand and heard second-hand the hell we rained down on the Iraqi people in 1991, as the first exodus of refugees began making their way into the shanty streets of Amman, telling their stories of killed family members, destroyed homes and shattered dreams. Our mosque in Panama City was frequently visited by aid workers collecting funds for the victims of Desert Storm. They showed us photographs of deformed Iraqi children with disproportionate body parts, missing limbs and water-borne diseases (due to the sewage that ran in the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers after the U.S. had bombed Iraq’s water-treatment facilities in Desert Storm). As a result, water-borne diseases that never existed prior to the Gulf War plagued the new generation of Iraq’s babies.

Of course, many of those diseases were treatable with antibiotics, but we had also imposed a ban on antibiotics via UN economic sanctions. I was only nine at the time, but those photographs remain imprinted on my consciousness until this day, reminding me that a patriotic citizen is a citizen who is engaged; a patriotic citizen is a citizen who questions and challenges one’s government when it destroys innocent civilian life; a patriotic citizen is a citizen who holds one’s government morally accountable.

As my Iraqi-American friends began visiting relatives in Iraq and as I met Iraqi refugees in Jordan, I learned of the unimaginable plight suffered by the Iraqi people during almost thirteen years of economic sanctions. When one of my friends returned back to Florida after spending the summer in Baghdad, she recounted how most of the people she met in Iraq hadn’t seen or eaten meat for months. A carton of eggs cost her aunt, who was a physician, a fourth of her monthly income. If a physician could hardly afford a carton of eggs, what about the average Iraqi?

The sanctions had not only destroyed Iraq’s economy, but the moral fabric of society. My Iraqi friends described how families had been reduced to sheer poverty; how fathers were compelled to steal from their own neighbors to keep their children from starving; how years of desperation and poverty had stripped Iraqis of their dignity and distorted their sense of morality. In nearly a decade, over half a million Iraqi children died as a result of the trade embargo, according to UNICEF. Dennis Halliday, the first UN Assistant Secretary General and Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq, resigned from his post in 1998 in objection to the sanctions, claiming that "We are in the process of destroying an entire society. It is as simple and terrifying as that. It is illegal and immoral."

These are the images that have come to define America in Iraqis’ consciousness. Unlike this administration, the Iraqi people do not suffer from short-term amnesia. After supporting their dictator, wiping out their infrastructure, dropping over 300 tons of depleted uranium (DU) weaponry over their homes, schools, hospitals, refineries and even a bomb shelter in 1991, and then depriving them of basic necessities of survival through sanctions, how in the world could anyone expect the Iraqi people to embrace us with open arms and rose petals when we invaded their country a second time in March 2003?

Of course the Iraqi people want us out. Not only because we’ve unjustly invaded their sovereign country, but because they don’t trust us. And they have good reason not to. Quite frankly, based on the history of our foreign policy in Iraq for the last twenty years, I wouldn’t trust us either.

I’m personally tired of hearing people argue, “We need to finish what we started.” We started a war that we’re terribly losing and will continue to lose. How does one finish that? Moreover, the major issue that war-advocates seem to miss is that U.S. military presence in Iraq is a destabilizing force in and of itself. As long as we continue to militarily occupy Iraq, we will continue to provide fuel to the insurgency, which will view any elected Iraqi government as a puppet of the U.S. Our presence in Iraq undermines the credibility and legitimacy of the current Iraqi government; it hinders their ability to assume full control and make progress; and most importantly, it is fueling the insurgency.

As Robert Pape demonstrates in Dying to Win: The Logic of Suicide Terrorism, nearly every case of suicide terrorism in the world is motivated by a foreign occupation. Iraq is a case in point. Iraq never experienced a single suicide terrorist attack in its history prior to the U.S. invasion in 2003. Nevertheless, “every year that the United States has stationed 150,000 combat troops in Iraq, suicide terrorism has doubled,” according to Pape’s research.

I think it’s time that Americans stand up and say “enough is enough.” The body count of dead Iraqis and U.S. and British troops is on the perpetual rise day after day. Families are being torn apart – here and in Iraq. Billions of U.S. tax dollars have been wasted on an unjust, immoral war that has not served the strategic interests of our country and has wreaked havoc on the Iraqi people and the entire region. The irony of it all is that the Bush administration is willing to sacrifice our freedom at the altar of security, yet it is willing to sacrifice whatever remains of Iraq’s security at the altar of stupidity.