How anyone can be sane and continue to believe that Iraq is not in the midst of civil war is beyond me.
Well, I suppose one could truthfully assert that there is no civil war: The country is on the other side of civil war - into chaos. A little over a week ago, a series of car bombs exploded in Baghdad's "Sadr City," a slum named after the belligerent Shiite leader Moqtada al-Sadr. Throughout the month of November, the United Nations estimates that more than 100,000 people fled the country, while more than 1,000 have died in the last month, and over twice as many died in October.
Even George Bush is looking for an exit strategy. The man is so terribly stubborn, it has taken more coalition deaths than people who died in the World Trade Centers and approval ratings hovering in the 30s to get him to reconsider his mind. Such stubbornness - often mistaken for righteous conviction - has, strangely, been sold as one of his strengths. A man who is completely unwilling to consider arguments for opposing viewpoints has no business in a position where honesty - the very opposite of the behavior he's displayed - is paramount. To hammer the point home, witness how the Bush campaign attacked Senator Kerry for "flip-flopping" back in 2004, as if reconsidering one's own opinion is a bad thing.
Speaking of considering opposing opinions, let's consider two of the prevailing arguments for remaining in Iraq and evaluate them objectively.
The most convincing one, I think, are the appeals to sympathy for the Iraqi people from conservatives. The arguments are, unfortunately, belated and - albeit, I suspect, unintentionally - gloss over the changing reasons for invading Iraq.
I wonder: Will the human cost of an ongoing insurgency and continuing sectarian warfare over the next few decades - for that is certainly how long the United States will remain in Iraq should we decide to "stay the course" - be greater than the human cost of an outright civil war? Thousands and more civilians are dying each month. We can see no end in sight to the fighting, and so we can expect possibly millions dead, extrapolating the trend, if we remain in Iraq. The situation would be little different, in the end, if the United States disengaged; it would be over more quickly, if only by Syrian, Turkish and Iranian intervention, and the numbers dead would not be significantly greater.
"We broke it, so we ought to fix it" - some may liken our situation in Iraq to one of a customer who has accidentally broken a vase in a china shop. The analogy is a false one; it would be more apt to the situation to consider a customer who is trying to fix the vase with glue that dissolves the ceramic. Iraq is broken, and, at this point, it's not a stretch of the imagination to conclude that we simply can't fix it. Certainly, we won't be able to fashion it into a liberal Western democracy, as frankly crazy neoconservative thought concludes. A fundamentally religious population will see to that.
I've said it before, and I'll probably say it again: The problem of Iraq reduces to one of simple sunk costs. We mustn't permit pride or inertia to force us to continue wasting resources in a struggle for a country which not only rejects liberal Western democracy, but also is setting back our strategic position in the global struggle for the hearts and minds of the Muslim world.
Neal Coleman is a freshman mathematics major and writes 'The Bogeyman' for the Daily News. His views do not necessarily agree with those of the newspaper.
Write to Neal at necoleman@bsu.edu.
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