(Part 1 of 2)
(The complete piece should be out early Morning around 3 A.M.-ish)
(I'll put everything together as one full piece.)
(I just checked N.Z. Bears TTLB, would someone please buy him some good happy pills? Now I'm 175? Something is really weird and I haven't even bribed him yet.)
Sometimes I turn on the news and all I see is how yet another bomb has gone off killing some Iraqi civilians and maybe a U.S. Marine or two. It happens with regular frequency and it’s rather depressing. One place has gotten so bad, Fallujah, it is being re-captured. Another, Mosul, is in a pretty sad state as well. There is a whole list of people that would have the U.S. leave tomorrow if they could make it happen. It’s times like these that we need to reassess what is going on and why it is happening. Is the U.S. doing the right thing?
The part that disheartens me the most are the real insurgents. I’m not talking about the Baathist party that’s trying to retain control. I’m not talking about the militant fundamentalists, or hard-line terrorists as some call them. I’m not even talking about the locals that were threatened into terror or anti-democracy groups. I’m talking about the ones that have looked at their options and have chosen to believe that anything the U.S. represents will be bad for Iraq’s future and are willing to put their lives on the line to get them to leave.
These people are the freedom fighters of Iraq. They believe what they are doing is the same thing America did against Britain so many years ago. They are trying to liberate Iraq from its occupiers. Unfortunately, they fail to realize that America is doing everything within its power to enact peace and a free voting democracy in Iraq. They have been mislead, wrongly educated or have just plain chosen the wrong side. It’s not that they’re bad people. They’ve just made a bad decision and will be forced to pay for it with their lives.
When I say that they will pay for their decision with their lives I do not mean the intention is to quell their decision making by force if necessary. I mean it is unfortunate because they have no hope of winning against the American and Iraqi forces. They are doomed to die alongside those that would seek to destroy Iraq just to see America fail at the hands of terror.
The Iraqi forces are gaining new recruits every day. They just recently graduated 6,000 new forces for fast action response teams. Although they are not to par with teams such as the SAS, SEALs, Rangers, and a host of others, they are superior forces to the standard Iraqi force on the ground today and show a new tiered effect within the Iraqi military. As for the U.S. military, the more they attack them the more we realize there is a definite need to maintain a large force in the region. They are there to gain and maintain the peace. Their vigilance will only increase if you attack them.
What makes everything so difficult is our inability to tell which group is which. Can you tell a freedom fighter from a Baathist from a terrorist by the way he hells out: “Allah Akbar!” or “god is great”? The media isn’t helping matters either. Many of them are filming the insurgents with the same amount or more frequency as the legitimate forces. Some have even gone as far as to interview them so that they may tell a story of peace and happiness through martyrdom. All the while not making any differentiations between groups. The media on the ground has failed in its job to report exactly who is who in this struggle for peace. They report everyone as an insurgent regardless of where they come or why they are fighting.
I really feel for these people and wish there was a way that they could be saved from whatever woes that will befall them. This is what makes me ask if what America is doing is the right thing to do.
(More to come including the bibliography and such.)
(Maybe by Monday I'll be a higher being?....nah.)