Getting the U.S. out of the Middle East

I wrote this in response to emails from a reader who was concerned that a rapid U.S. withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan, as advocated by Ralph Nader, would lead to chaos in the region, control by the Taliban, and further suffering.

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We are not preventing chaos in the Middle East, we are causing it.

I doubt that the Taliban will take over Iraq. Al-Qaeda, which is fundamentalist Muslim but not the same thing as the Taliban, has quickly worn out its welcome in Iraq by indiscriminate killing. Iraq was a secular country before we invaded and set off a civil war which has killed around a million people, a strange way to keep Iraqis from suffering.

I don’t like the Taliban, but my feelings about them are irrelevant. It is up to the people in Afghanistan and Pakistan to decide how they want to run their countries. Right now we’re supporting a loose coalition of warlords in Afghanistan, and killing a lot of noncombatants. We are not the good guys in Iraq, Afghanistan or Pakistan, we’re the bad guys.

Pakistan has nuclear weapons, so it is very dangerous for us to further destabilize it by invading along its border with Afghanistan, which Obama wants to do, and which Bush is already doing to some extent, or by trying to force the Pakistan government to fight the border tribes. We are spreading the Afghanistan war into Pakistan, just as Nixon spread the Vietnam war into Thailand and Cambodia, with genocidal results. Where does it stop, when the whole Middle East is in flames?

As I understand it, the most basic problem with Middle Eastern countries is that their populations are very young, with lots of unemployed young men, and autocratic governments which aren’t doing anything about creating enough jobs. This creates fertile ground for recruitment by fundamentalists.

There are also long-standing, well deserved resentments against the U.S. and other rich countries for supporting those autocratic governments, in order to control the oil and do business. Doing business includes selling large numbers of weapons to these governments, a great opportunity for our “defense” industry. The U.S. is one of the world’s leading arms dealers.

Our troops are not in Iraq or Afghanistan to protect the people. That’s not what they do. They kill people. That is their job, what they are paid to do. The majority of the people they kill are noncombatants who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. On a CNN panel discussion, an Iraqi said that their houses are very close together, so when we bomb one it also takes out the houses on either side. The U.S. uses air power as much as possible to keep down our troop casualties.

One of the soldiers interviewed in “The Ground Truth” talked about what happens when they take fire from an area. They just saturate the area with return fire. This suppresses the incoming fire, but it also kills or wounds everyone else in the area. This is what the soldiers are told to do by their commanders. They come back with guilty consciences and PTSD.

We invaded Iraq in order to control its oil and use its land for military bases to extend control over the rest of the Middle East, and its oil. We have the blood of over a million people on our hands. This is murder for profit, to protect our middle-class way of life, and there is no way it can be morally justified. We have to get out, as quickly as is physically possible. I won’t vote for anything less. To do so would make me morally responsible for the killing which will happen in the following years, as we drag it out.

By the way, Joe Biden, Obama’s new VP, was a prime mover in starting the Iraq war. He advocated it years before it started. This is the man Obama picked for his foreign policy “experience.” Today’s Register-Guard has an approving editorial making an unfortunate comparison with Kennedy picking LBJ because of his political experience. We know how that turned out. Experience doesn’t cure stupidity.