In response to Senator Bill Frist’s proclamation that Democrats wish to “cut and run” from Iraq, Senator John Kerry charged Republicans with the inept policy of “lie and die.” While John Kerry has emerged as an eloquent critic of the war, such sloganeering demonstrates how far we, as Americans, are from a thoughtful and honest debate on the war in Iraq.

Freedom rarely rises from the ashes of war. Our initial invasion led to the death of thousands of Iraqis, and our brutal occupation insulted and humiliated the Iraqi people’s Islamic sensitivities. There is no doubt that most Iraqis despised Saddam’s rule, but they were equally opposed to our own from the occupation’s origins. Such a situation all too naturally produced a vast, nationalist insurgency as well as opening the doors to a largely foreign group of terrorists bent on unleashing sectarian strife and civil war. Our response was no less ugly, typified by the invasion of Fallujah, where nearly 300,000 citizens fled their homes to escape the conflict, although hospitals still reported that well over a thousand citizens of Fallujah may have been killed in the battle.

Conditions in Iraq are such that an exodus of nearly one million Iraqis have fled the “freedom” of Iraq for the relative safety of neighboring Syria and Jordan. While American politicians celebrate the “transforming power of freedom,” thousands of Sunnis flee the government security forces, death squads and militias that have executed thousands solely on the grounds of their religion. Meanwhile, Shia civilians live in constant fear of suicide bombings and reprisal executions by Sunni militias. From the start of the war, terrorist scholars confirmed that Al-Qaida recruitment was greatly increased. Contrary to popular conception, our war was empowering and enlarging terrorist forces, not weakening them. Moreover, American air strikes and forces on the ground continue to kill civilians by the dozens.

The most cautious of casualty reports have verified that a minimum of approximately 50,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed since the American invasion. Several studies indicate that the death toll by now may have gone well beyond 100,000 civilians. And thousands continue to die from the American occupiers, foreign terrorists, Shia security forces, Sunni insurgents and the many sectarian militias fueling this growing civil war. Unfortunately, such facts completely undermine the rationale for war in the first place because we have all too accurately replicated Saddam’s most heinous crimes.

Nearly every time a tyrant falls his minions are rounded up and prosecuted, oftentimes extra-legally. However, the terror of the “democratic” regime in Iraq is approaching Bolshevik proportions. Every day dozens of Sunnis are found in ditches or buried alongside local roads, all bearing the mark of the government’s security forces — a lone bullet in the back of the head. Not because they were responsible for collaborating with Saddam for war crimes, but simply because they are members of the same religion. Given this situation and the American invasion and occupation that precipitated it, it is no wonder that the Iraqi population is almost uniformly opposed to our presence.

And so Americans must confront the most elementary of facts. If Iraq is to become a viable democracy, in the sense that it’s governance is representative of the people, then it goes without saying that the hated occupying force must leave.

And than there is Haditha. Unfortunately, the mainstream perception of the event is tragically skewed. Haditha is not a war crime; war itself is the crime, for it is the scourge of war that produces such a monstrous act, not the barbarity of a few crazed soldiers.

By all accounts, the invasion and occupation of Iraq was illegal according to every major tenet of international law, from Nuremberg to Geneva. In an illegal war, every act is a crime. When a government chooses to throw its soldiers into a nasty, bloody conflict, they are undoubtedly going to encounter certain horrors. And the product of such horrors is all too understandable. The American soldiers at Haditha are not monsters; after some time of watching one’s best friends suffer and die, a person will naturally grow upset. And in the unimaginable terror of such a situation, these soldiers responded by killing twenty-four unarmed civilians — women and children, fathers and sons, little brothers and sisters. This was not the product of a few monstrous men, but of a monstrous war. Judging by the military’s initial account of the incident (they claimed an insurgent bomb was responsible for the killing), such incidents must be all too common in Iraq.

But rather than prosecute the leaders responsible for creating such a hideous war, we will prosecute a few soldiers who exhibited a tragically human response to a grotesque situation. Our people do not betray their government by speaking out against this war. Our government has betrayed its people and its soldiers by unleashing one of the greatest crimes of the twenty-first century and calling it an act for freedom.

The words “cut and run” should not be feared by honest, democratic citizens. They are the words of the tyrant and his minions, designed to stifle debate and sow fear among dissidents so that aggression and oppression may continue.

It is time to cut and run. Time to cut the hated occupation and run from the brutality and violence that we are responsible for. It is time to start working for peace, which entails fleeing from our previous path of bloodshed. War was not the answer in Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Iraq and a thousand other bloody excursions, and it will not be the right answer for Iran, North Korea, Syria, China, Libya Cuba or any other demon we can conjure up. War is never the answer.
 
 

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