Today’s Topic: The Ramifications of Freedom Given At Gunpoint
I am constantly flabbergasted at the myriad of excuses for the failure of trying to bestow freedom upon the Iraqi people at the end of a gun.
There is no historical proof that such an action could be accomplished, nay, rather the opposite is true. Freedom is WON, not bestowed. There are no accounts of freedom being bestowed upon a country by aggression.
Ok, so don’t start arguing about Japan and Germany after WWII. The Allies were not the aggressor and in fact were the benefactors of freedom to those countries, righting wrongs done by governments against their own people.
There is nothing the same in this aggressive occupation of Iraq by American forces without prior cause. Remember, even the United Nations’ Secretary Kofi Annon declared America’s invasion of Iraq as an illegal war. Even Pope John Paul denounced the invasion.
The unprovoked aggression of the United States discounts all other reasonable arguments or avenues towards a people gaining their freedom, for the true idea of freedom is that freedom is gained, not given. Freedom has to be earned by the people for no one can KNOW the sacrifices that freedom entails without having actually made the decision as a people to make those sacrifices.
This is why Iraqi freedom will never be realized as long as American troops are on the ground in Iraq nor in Afghanistan. For you see, others than the people direct the efforts towards freedom. Freedom is based only on the idea of all the people being free, and if one person is not free then all the people cannot be free. When Afghanistan had its elections the people didn’t vote for a new government. They had that government instituted upon them by the United States and the warlords working in collusion. To the people, just as in Viet Nam, the only difference was that the government was something being foisted upon them without the people’s sacrifice to gain that government, and without the willful march of the people towards freedom regardless of the sacrifices.
As it stands in Afghanistan, it is still possible that the Taliban will be seen as the people’s choice against the aggressive United States and the west, for a known is better than an unknown. President Karzai is president in name only. The warlords surrounding Kabul have more power AND support than this American puppet.
Don’t get me wrong. President Karzai is not a bad man, although his association with the CIA during the Soviet’s occupation places him in both an admired position but just as real the Afghani recognize that his American affiliations means his loyalties are in question.
Loyalties in Afghanistan, as in Iraq, stand above any recognition of regional or national government. Loyalties in most third world countries start at home, with local and regional strongmen being given respect and honor for their strength. Loyalties build strength amongst the people, whereas federal governments are seen as outsiders who do not deserve the same respect or loyalty.
When applied to Iraq then one can easily see why the new Iraqi Army and Police fail to hold together when pressed into service against other Iraqis. The Iraqi Army is a geologically dispersed yet a centrally accumulated conglomeration of troops, all loyal to their own family, clan and region. But these loyalties don’t hold if the soldier is from Basra and deployed in Baghdad. Nor does it hold if these same troops were deployed within their own region and their orders conflicted with their loyalties. Dying for family or clan is a no brainer. Dying for any other purpose hopefully comes with old age.
This is why such a strongman as Saddam Hussein was able to use his Sunni loyalties in providing all the necessary troops to ensure the continued existence of a federal Iraq.
Obviously this is not the formula for freedom. Nor is having invasive occupiers with boots on the ground a good method to provide freedom. To the Iraqi people, one dictator is just as bad as the other. And again, we have a Prime Minister placed in a position of authority and recognized as the American puppet he really is.
Before anyone wishes to try to change history, remember, George Bush didn’t want the elected Prime Minister, so changes had to be made and Jalalabad was replaced with Al Malaki. If an outside force such as the United States can ignore the people, forcing them to live with a hand selected Prime Minister rather than living with the one the Iraqi people’s elected representatives voted for, then the Iraqi people also realize that their votes don’t really count for much.
If your votes don’t count and your elected government can be manipulated, then the possibility of getting the invading force out of your country is nil, and this breeds resentment and insurgency. AND it opens up the doors for the typical Arab philosophy, which is the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Therefore, Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia has gained a foothold even though the majority of Iraqi people would rather not have even more problems foisted upon them.
So let’s just look at the problem from a realistic viewpoint rather than Bush’s skewed one.
Let’s just get this right. The insurgency is just that. Iraqi people fighting for their own country against a foreign invader and occupier. These are the true freedom fighters in Iraq. I’m sorry they are killing Americans, but they are no more wrong than America’s freedom fighters during the American Revolutionary War. And in both cases the end of such insurgencies would have only taken both King Georges to realize that no war was necessary.
The insurgency’s life comes from and is sustained by the outside forces and will go away when those outside forces are removed. This means both the United States Armed Forces and Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. In fact, Al Qaeda’s intercepted transmissions have expressed the worry about the terrorists giving up and going home if America withdrew. Hence, it would seem to me that Bush is playing into their hands by apparently setting up America to be firmly planted within Iraq for the next 50 years.
So if we go away, the jihadists will go away, at least since their idea isn’t to fight other Arabs. And I have no doubts that this is true given the chance. In fact, I’m just as positive that the Iraqi people would rally together to kick Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia out of Iraq once and for all. Even Arabs in an Arab country are invaders if they are not Iraqis in Iraq.
At this point the only problem left to be solved for the Iraqi people to actually be free stems from the necessity of the religious differences being worked out or being plowed under by the victor. There is nothing America can do one way or the other in this conflict. It is between the religious factions of Iraq and must be solved by the Iraqi people without American troops’ hot breath breathing down their necks.
The truth of the situation is that we created the problem and if we went away, even though much must happen to make Iraq a truly free Iraq, we have to accept that an aggressive invader cannot bring freedom at the point of a gun. And it is true that Iraq may well spring into a full-fledged civil war, but it is also just as true that without the commitment of the people of Iraq to fight for and gain their freedom, they will never accomplish their freedom.
This is a major problem in the conflict because the majority of the people cannot fight for their own freedom. On one side they have the Americans and are denied the ability to defend themselves with weapons the bad guys have, and on the other they have the insurgents and the militias whom the Americans cannot even find much less defeat.
With one side gone there is more room for the average Iraqi to work towards their own determination of what freedom means to them. Without the ability to make that determination they are just caught between warring factions and those factions will continue to fight for years or even decades to come.
This is the can of worms we have opened upon our Iraq friends (I know, not a nice way to treat friends, now is it?). Since the can is opened there will be some of the worms that escape. That is just life. If you don’t want your worms to escape, don’t open the can.
Or better known as Colin Powell saying, "If you break it, you own it".
Well, Bush has broken it and we stood by and watched. Some even continue to firmly believe. Rather than try to own it and put it back together, it is much more likely that the people of Iraq will have a better chance of securing their own freedom than we will have in handing that freedom to them on a platter supported on the barrels of guns.
The facts on the ground support withdrawal of our troops. Only then can America start healing its wounds inflicted by a mismanaged Bush administration, and perhaps allow the US to start the process of healing it’s relationships with the world.
9:34:10 AM 
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