I and all people in the United States support our troops. Our troops are brave and strong and they risk their lives. Support takes several forms. Support includes providing our troops with the means to make war and it includes the means to conclude a war. The means in both instances include intelligence and will.
It seems to me that concluding a war is dependent on the beginning of the war. The party who initiated the war seems to be the one who is most responsible for concluding it and that has meant, in recent history, that the initiator/aggressor has been forced to leave what has been invaded or surrender to those initially attacked. Germany and Japan finally surrendered. The North Koreans withdrew and ceased hostilities. We left Vietnam. We halted proceedings against Iraq in the early 90's. Things in the Baltics were ended when those being aggressive and brutal were stopped!
Sometimes we support our troops with weapons and armor and other resources they need to fight and win. On the other side we support them by getting them out of harms way!
Essentially we began the current war in Iraq. It is becoming more and more clear to citizens of the United States that this beginning was deeply flawed in all ways.
While it is a judgement call to go to war such a judgement should be very well considered because of the terrible destruction and death which is ever part of war. There are appropriate and right reasons to go to war. Self-defense is an appropriate reason. True proximate fear of aggression may be appropriate, too. On the other hand, there are inappropriate and wrong reasons to go to war such as greed and unfounded hate. Ignorance is not a reason to go to war. There is a right and and there is a wrong judgement which can be determined and which should be determined if war is to be considered and done. The judgement call must be made with special and great care by special and great people. Real intelligence must be brought to such a great and awful decision! Such special intelligence was not brought to this judgement call by our current national leadership.
Clearly our current national leadership is not special nor is it great. One can question the realness of our current leadership. That leadership has never been viewed as particularly intelligent nor good nor kind. That leadership has been useful to some people and some agendas and in quieter, calmer times whatever this leadership accomplished would probably not have been very dramatic or long lasting accept this leadership with all its weaknesses and lacks found itself with a most dramatic and significant event, i.e. the catatrophe of 9/11. Doing all the works of reacting, recovering, and preventing another such catatophe was the public rationale for putting our troops into harms way and that rationale was simply stated the wrong judgement call and that is now known and must now be dealt with appropriately and rightly!
Many citizens would like to see our troops out of harms way because we think our troops our bogged down in a situation which is terribly, terribly WRONG. It is WRONG and NOT RIGHT. Our troops were put into harms way with lies, incorrect intelligence, and poor planning. They should not have gone in to Iraq because Iraq was not where 9/11 came from nor did Iraq have the weapons of mass destruction they wre accused of having. Thus the lies and incorrect intelligence. As for the planning it had to be poor since it was badly based and furthermore the planning just didn't look forward to an exit strategy that would be acceptable to all.
There may have been a good reason to have gone into Iraq and that was the human rights abuses of the ruling regime. The only right way to address human rights issues is through the United Nations and/or the World Court. Our going in as a matter of asserted self-defense was a weak and untruthful one even if Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or had some link to 9/11 which it didn't. We have long not cared for human rights abuses even when they reach the level of genocide and in Iraq that was not the case and certainly not since the first Gulf War and the no-fly zones and sanctions which followed that war.
In general people do not want to go to war. People do not want their children or their friends to be put into harms way but that is appropriate under the right circumstances. The circumstances which brought us into Iraq were not appropriate
Intelligence usually would lead a person to echue war. The mass intelligence of the people of a democracy usually adds up to an avoidance of war. Democracies defend themselves. Offensive war is the thing of minorites and sick individuals. These minoriites and the sick individuals who lead them usually have a problem absorbing and integrating information but they do have a set of static values which they are SURE THEY CAN CORRECTLY APPLY. And they apply those values by oppression and war and destruction! The application is WILLFUL but not intelligent. It is NOT SMART.
Ultimately, the people of our country which IS still a democracy will assert their massed intelligence and wisdom along with the goodness and kindness and compassion which are our values and which are dynamic and true. Ultimately, we the people of these United States of America will do the right things and stop the wars and aggressions and bring a truly compassionate peace to the world with fairness and intelligence.
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