Difficult Choices For the Long Haul

Although forum duties and real life has made everything a bit busy on the home front for me, it has never escaped my mind to think about what America has gotten itself into when it comes to Iraq.

We're at the point in which some very deep choices have to be made. It is time to realize that the body count is getting higher, civil war is breaking out and the policies that the current Administration has pushed are not working. It is even getting to the point that the GOP (led by Minority Whip Trent Lott) is demanding that the Bush White House show some marked improvement or "else"(they never mentioned what the "else" constituted in the news, but it makes you wonder what they have up their sleeves).

Many times I have written on the state of America's soul as a nation. And I think that how we have conducted ourselves overseas can be a pretty good indicator of how dark it is right now. Of course, there will be people with a conscience trying to settle matters as amicably as they could. But in the end, there needs to be a face put on the "collateral damage" that Rumsfeld had glibly put early on in the Iraqi War.

Too many people have died. Too much rubble is in the streets. Iraq still is in the midst of a water and energy shortage. Their police force and army still needs to be built up. And there is still a movement to get America out of the country because damage has ensued.

It is hard to fathom, but there are still a small group of people who still think that we are doing things altruistically over there. In their minds, the United States is bringing "freedom" and "democracy" to Iraq. However, I wonder if they had read the Iraq Study Report made last year or actually view some of the documentaries on the state of things overseas. I even wonder if PNAC, the Downing Street Memos or the oil and defense industries making money over there mean a thing to them.

For the rest of us who do and can wade through the propaganda steadily coming through the pipeline of the MSM, we see the drastic effects of a failed policy that resulted in an insurmountable war. There are even more of us that voted our conscience last November when we got the politicians out who was contributing to this terrible policy and were instrumental in leading us as a country down the wrong path.

And seven years later, we still have not had any answers in terms of the "Terror Threat Management" theory that has been cast over the national populace. There are no answers for the torture that happened in Abu Graib or in Guantanamo Bay. No explainations are coming for "staying the course" over there, even with the protestations that George Tenet had spoken of in the press as of late.

We are still in a quagmire that continues to grow. Hope continues that a brave memberof Congress will force the issue of finally getting the truth out there so the American people can actually see what went wrong. And hopefully, there will be wise politicians finally starting to put together an exit strategy so that the men and women of our armed forces finally come home.

But the terrible realisation still is coming when viewing the repercussions of what had happened in the Middle East. America has ruined its good standing on the world stage. It has caused a lot of countries to question our mindset when choosing national leaders to govern the nation. And of course, we have still have to deal with reparing these politics in terms of foreign diplomacy.

It's time for Congress and the current Administration to finally stop the shenanigans and put an end to this dark mark in history so that things can change for the better.