It’s been nearly two years since I started Northern Letter, and I’ve been largely silent about the Iraq War. That was partly due to my decision to avoid making politics a major subject of this blog and partly due to the fact that I didn’t feel I had a great deal to add to the debate.

Now I feel that continuing to be silent would be wrong. It would only provide continued tacit consent to the occupation of Iraq. Much could be said on the subject, but I will try to keep my comments brief.

I originally supported the threat of force against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq back in 2002. It seemed to me to be the only way to get weapons inspectors back in that country. It also seemed to be a way to enforce U.N. resolutions against Iraq, as President Bush declared when he spoke to the United Nations in the lead-up to the war. Based on what I learned through the media, I believed Saddam Hussein was actively seeking to obtain and use weapons of mass destruction. (See, for instance, Jeffrey Goldberg’s March 25, 2002 article in The New Yorker, “The Great Terror,” which stated that Saddam Hussein would soon have nuclear weapons capability.) Thus I was one of many liberals who supported a hard line against Iraq.

I now feel that I mistakenly trusted the Bush Administration to do all it could to avoid war. Instead, it clearly wanted to wage a pre-emptive war to eliminate a hostile regime, and it used and manipulated the tense conditions after September 11, 2001, in order to do so. It also used misleading and false intelligence to make its case for war. And I myself put far too much trust in violence as a way to solve problems.

Now there is the question of what to do about the current mess. While I fear the possible negative effects of withdrawing troops, those same troops have not fostered a viable, secure existence for the Iraqi people. Thus I favor a pull-out of U.S. troops in the near future.

All in all, the Iraq War has been a debacle for the United States, a waste of precious life and resources. Although I never had the opportunity to vote on the war and have not voted for the Republican politicians who led us into it, I regret voicing support for it before it began and in its early stages.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 22nd, 2006 at 3:02 pm and is filed under Politics.