EVIL! *><*

According to Baker’s report, I agree something needs to be done to resolve the Arab-Israeli dispute. Though America did support Israel, I am pretty sure we had no intention do so for spite against the Arabs. I highly disagree with shifting our main objective to getting our troops out. Before the discussion today, I was pretty passionate about getting our soldiers out, but not knowing the risks of doing so. Back then, my only reason was to keep more of ours from dying, but now I see things in a whole new perspective. Though there a death squads, traces of Al-Queda, and Shiite insurgents and what not in Iraq, the bigger concern is to stabilize the nation before its neighbors seek to either dismantle it or conquer it. Saudi Arabia announced it would send forces over to help “make sure the Suni don’t take over” when in fact the Suni are the majority. Right there, that’s a potential danger, for those forces could very well be terrorists. Note I said, could, not are.

The Removal of our troops would mean we had intensified and sped up the process of which Iraq would fall into an era of deep trouble and political unrest and then abandoned the nation left to its own devices and to its neighbors. I also believe that one day Saddam would have naturally died, or fell from power, but his strict removal by us swept the nation into a depression. This was the beginning of the struggle to keep Iraq standing on its own two feet.

Intensifying our presence there does seem more reasonable as long we are still supportive, but more along the sidelines. The Iraqi army will hopefully be able to support and protect its own country, and with our help (though it seems they really don’t want it at all) this could be possible. This completely contrasts with how I felt before, but hey, opinions change. Especially when they get a few facts straight.

Election Day has come and passed, Lieberman won, Bush is still in office, whupdeedo, but what do we do about kids as young as our seniors who are putting their lives on the line to “police” a country that clearly wants us out? Sure I agree that now that the Democrats almost officially control the House of Representatives and The Senate we have the potential to change some things around here, but what worries me is ‘will we’? My mom is a teacher and one of her kids has a brother who died in Iraq. I was grading his geography paper (and it wasn’t turning out too well) and called my mother over to help decipher what hyroglyphs he had tried to print. She told me to; ‘go easy on him, he doesn’t have a brother anymore because he was killed in Iraq.’

Many of the stories troops tell in the blogs are about everyday life at their bases. But some also show how terrifying, confusing and chaotic battle can be. Among the most gripping stories told so far: Army Spc. Colby Buzzell’s Aug. 5, 2004, account in his blog My War of a battle in Mosul, Iraq, the day before. “I saw 2 guys creeping around this corner … (and) hiding behind a stack of truck tires,” he wrote. “I saw another guy come out of that corner with an RPG (rocket-propelled grenade) in his hands. I freaked … I gathered my composure as fast as I could, put the cross hairs (of a gun) on them and engaged them. … I didn’t see anybody move from behind those tires after that.”

It kills me to hear that we have people every day in a country we aren’t very familiar or friendly with and are dying trying to help a people that obviously don’t want any. Our soldiers are not trained to police politically unstable nations, so why are we still there? This sounds more like a job for the United Nations, that way perhaps they can help take our troops out. Not only that, but our taxes (as my father has complained about) are going up due to the insane amount of revenue spent on keeping and supplying our guys over there. We keep getting calls for my brother from the Marines, saying they need him to enroll, but both my mom and my dad agree we’d rather move to Canada before let him join to be killed in a foreign country! We need to bring our brothers and sisters home!