I spent the last few days in Mosul gathering information for a story on the Ninewa Provincial Reconstruction Team.
I’ve been shot at lots of times with rockets and mortars since I arrived in Iraq. That’s not personal. It’s just luck of the draw whether or not those things will land on you.
In Mosul, I experienced a small arms attack for the first time. Small arms attacks are very personal. The first mission I was out on took sniper fire from somewhere. We don’t know where. The driver’s windshield on one of our humvees took a direct hit. Had it not been for the bulletproof windshield he would have been shot through the face. American engineering and technology prevented that.
Rolling in humvees is a hair raising experience. The tension is palpable. We stop for nothing at all. I have to admire the soldiers who participate in such missions daily. They are my heroes. Their lives are on the line every single day, yet they remain calm, controlled and professional. I cannot emphasize enough just how professional these young men were at every moment I was with them.
Meanwhile, back home, the debate rages.
Bush made clear at a recent news conference that defense of his Iraq policy would be at the center of this year’s campaign. He noted that there are “people in the Democrat Party who believe that the best course of action is to leave Iraq before the job is done, period, and they’re wrong.”
The president repeated that message Thursday to American Legion delegates, declaring: “The United States will not leave Iraq until victory is achieved.”
So the battle is joined. That leaves it to Democrats to find their voice, to get beyond criticism of Bush’s decision to launch the Iraq war (which many of them supported), the conduct of the occupation and their vague call for “a new direction in Iraq, with responsible redeployment of U.S. forces … that begins this year,” as House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi has put it.
Just what sort of victory are we trying to achieve in Iraq? Well, after my trip to Mosul I can speak on that, and I will. We’re trying to bring Iraqis running water, stable electricity and basic human rights. We’re trying to help them educate their children and live peacefully with each other. In the north of Iraq, there are Sunnis, Kurds, Christians and Yezidis. All of them are human beings, but they were not treated equally under Saddam. In the new Iraq that the coalition and the newly elected Iraqi government are trying to build, these people will be equal.
Equality does not interest those who had power under Saddam’s rule. They want to be back on top. And then there are the common criminals. Saddam released 200,000 of them back into the general population in 2003. Add to that the long history of conflict between various sects and ethnic groups in the regoin, and you have the messiness that is Iraq in 2006.
George W. Bush and his administration have made some mistakes. Whether or not you believe the original invasion was a mistake is long past being irrelevant. What matters now, to me at least, is the principle of “you break it, you pay for it.”
We inserted ourselves into this country to remove an evil man from power, ostensibly because he was harboring bad people who represented a threat to our citizens. In so doing, we removed stability. And we’ve got to stay until we can reintroduce a completely different kind of stability. The stability of the old Iraq was achieved through ruthlessness. Just ask the Kurd I interviewed while in Mosul. He works for the coalition now. Several decades ago, when he was 19, Saddam’s men kidnapped him from the north and brought him to Baghad, where they pulled out his toenails with pliers and did other things which he doesn’t talk about to this day.
When you vote, you must vote your conscience. I have not heard the Democratic party lucidly explain how they will fix what we broke. All I’ve heard is how Iraq is a mess. Well, it is. But things are slowly improving. Iraq’s national and provincial government are learning and growing stronger. Iraq’s security forces are building and improving in capability. It’s expensive, messy, and sometimes heartrending. And people are dying everyday.
The alternative, however, is unpalatable to me. Pulling our troops out now would be a disaster. What the Democrats would do if they became the majority again in regards to Iraq is quite unclear. That means I won’t be able to cast a vote for any of them. I’m unwilling to condemn Iraq to 40 more years of what my Kurdish friend and his family members were subjected too. We need to stay and help clean up the mess. Where’s the Democratic plan to do that? Someone point me in the right direction.