The U.S. left the track of morality when we invaded Iraq.
Our thin excuse of ‘pre-emptive’ war fell apart when no weapons of mass destruction were found. We abdicated any possible claims to morality at Abu Ghraib. In more than four years of war, we have yet to establish order or basic security—at the price of hundreds of thousands of lives, including uncounted Iraqi civilians and children and more than three thousand of our own soldiers.
In good faith, our young men and women put their lives on the line for policies they were told would benefit our country. Yet in the U.S., the war has starved our resources for every nurturing, caring function of government—from effective response to emergencies like Katrina to even providing adequate counseling and aftercare for our own returning servicemen and women.
Four years into the occupation, Baghdad is a ruined city, with most highways, shops, and services closed, electricity provided for only an hour a day, and citizens afraid to leave their homes. In one of the most oil-rich nations of the world, people sleep in their cars at gas stations as the waiting lines to get fuel can be twenty-four hours long. Sectarian violence rages unchecked, and Al Qaeda now has a new base. At home in the U.S., we are less safe, less capable of responding to real dangers, and more hated than ever before.
In Alcoholics Anonymous, they say that insanity is repeating the same acts and expecting different results. Having utterly failed to provide even minimal order and security to date, the Bush administration wants to stay on. Why? Iraq still has one of the world’s largest oil reserves. The proposed Iraqi oil law, one of the so-called ‘benchmarks’ of progress, would turn over control of the majority of Iraq’s oil resources to foreign corporations, with contracts highly favorable to corporate interests and no protection for Iraq’s workers or future generations. There is no morality in profiteering from the death and destruction of war.
The majority of Iraqis want us to go. Our presence exacerbates the sectarian divides, and fuels the fury of the insurgents. We can serve no moral purpose by continuing an immoral aftermath to a deceitfully conceived, ineptly conducted, failed and immoral war.
A moral course of action might be to declare a day of national penitence, when all of us—war supporters, and those of us who opposed the war but failed to stop it—fall on our knees and beg the forgiveness of the Iraqi people and the world at large. Better yet would be to remove the architects of these policies from every position of power so that they can devote the rest of their lives, and the fortunes they have gleaned, to works of restitution—changing the bedpans of wounded soldiers, for example, or educating Iraqi orphans.
Barring that, at minimum we can learn from this devastating mistake, and vow that the headiness of military power will never again seduce us with dreams of empire. We can return to being what the vast majority of Americans want to be: a real democracy, of worth, not wealth, that cares for its people and for those beyond its borders, that spreads freedom by example, not by the power of the gun and the bomb, that cherishes the children of all nations. Then the dead could know that their lives were not given in vain.
www.starhawk.org
Some useful links for more information on the Iraq oil law and current conditions:
www.dahrjamailiraq.com/
David Bacon San Jose Mercury News, June 6, 2007
http://www.bushagenda.net/article.php?id=402
www.bushagenda.net
www.priceofoil.org
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