The World According to Akash: Iraq

Akash Desai

“Allow the president to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such a purpose—and you allow him to make war at pleasure.”

                                                                        -Abraham Lincoln

Here’s a riddle for all of you brainiacs out there:

This was started by us (the U.S.) but not started by us. We are there but not there. The true goal by continuing this is to achieve higher industrial and fiscal standing, even though we have spent 438 billion dollars funding it, driving ourselves into the ground with debt. We do this to save lives, but instead we take the very ones we are trying to save. Believers of this think themselves true patriots, when actually those who do not have the right state of mind to save us from our downfall.

The Iraq war is a war based on false circumstances, false circumspection, and false convictions. We, the people and country of the U.S., are there physically in the form of a small but steadily escalating number of troops, but we are not there as a country, body and soul. It’s no real debate what America thinks of the Bush administration, whether Democrat or Republican. One look at his approval ratings over the years and you would think you were looking at a graph for the amount of ice caps left in the arctic.

Ignoring the fact that after we failed to find Weapons of Mass Destruction, we seemingly transitioned into an entire war on terrorism and Saddam Hussein, there have been numerous studies to show the state of Iraqi citizens during Saddam Hussein’s rule and after he collapsed. The mortality rate is higher, and less people even have clean drinking water. Is this really the solution? Maybe if we want to take down a tyrant we can try not to just invade and occupy his country, and do a little more pre-emptive thinking instead of pre-emptive attacking.

There are those who argue that all of these billions of dollars we spend are only being put back into our own economy – this industrial economic complex drives us higher. How can putting your own country trillions of dollars in debt drive you higher? It drives us higher only in the sense that we are putting fake money into the hands of our industrial business – this money is coming from a bottomless bank account, which one day we hope to pay off. It’s like being the banker in a game of Monopoly, and buying everybody’s property off of them because you think you can just spend all the money that you really can’t. If we are so hasty to spend billions to drive an economy, why buy guns and weapons that kill thousands of Iraqis? Does healthcare, education, or cancer research (for a start) remind anybody of alternatives we could be using this money for?

The most infuriating thing for many has to be that for some reason, America as a country refuses to learn from her past. Vietnam, for example. Did we learn nothing fighting the Vietcong in there own home? Oh wait, I almost forgot. We were just too busy letting the wonderful seedling of democracy flower in their country. It gets easy to forget these things.

In Vietnam we did not declare war, and neither have we in Iraq . Did the whole administration forget about the constitution? When an administration can defy so blatantly a clear doctrine of the constitution, they lose all integrity towards it and it becomes just a piece of paper. When we have an administration expecting to find stockpiles of WMD’s and find none, expecting to be treated as liberators and gods, but instead find grenades being thrown in the place of flowers, we have an administration that has broken a moral obligation to its own people – an obligation of truth.

“In war, truth is the first casualty.”         -Aeschylus