Oversimplification of Iraq

It's Not a Yes/No Issue

Published on August 4, 2005 By Zoomba In Current Events

Another blogger posted an article this morning asking if we should be in Iraq, deleting all comments that were not a simple Yes/No answer, not allowing explanation or justification of the answer. I'm not linking the article here because I believe it to be a waste. It's a bad question that oversimplifies a complicated situation and an attempt to eliminate any reasoning and reduce it to a black and white issue where it's always been a dozen different shades of gray at best.

Is the presense of troops in Iraq a yes/no, right/wrong, good/bad situation? Not by a long shot. The issue is a million times more complicated and gets more complicated each and every day.

Could you have rephrased the question and asked it a few years back? Sure, you could have framed it as "Should we go into Iraq?" THAT could have been a yes/no because we weren't there yet, we hadn't shaken up the status quo yet. It was still a theoretical situation that could be debated in terms of yes/no. Now, we have troops on the ground, a newly planted government and the turmoil associated with that turnover of power. We went in and created chaos in order to change things.

Do I think we still need to be there? Yeah, we created a mess that we are now obligated to clean up, we have to see it through to completion
Should we have done it in the first place? Not sure really... Yes it's nice to free a nation from a dictator, but I'm not sold on the idea that it should have been our job to do it.
Do I wish our troops were home safe and sound? Of course, I would love nothing more than to have them all back home, but I know it's not in the cards just yet.

It's a complex situation that defies simplification. To reduce it to Yes/No shows ignorance of the whole deal, it shows you're not actually looking for any sort of statistic or debate or any honest information, you've made up your mind and you just want something to reenforce whatever it is you've decided on.

Comments

Dr Guy

on Aug 04, 2005

Well, he did warn us that only Yes or No would be accepted. So I skipped it. There are other forums where you can create polls. Perhaps he should have created one there and just linked to it.

As to your explanation, kind of llike the answers I got to my question. No one would give me a yes or no answer, but then it was a tough one. Still, at times, if one phrases the question right, you can elicit a simple answer. As you correctly point out, that time is long since passed for Iraq. You did manage to give a yes, no and maybe here depending upon the time. And that is about as simple as anyone can really make it.

Leauki

on Aug 04, 2005

Define "mess".

Why is Iraq now a "mess" but wasn't when Saddam did the butchering?

Is "mess" the same as a "problem" with fewer victims?

If so, why is a "mess" something one would try to avoid, given an existing "problem"?

For me the answer is very simple. On the one hand there is a fascist dictator and hundreds of thousands of victims, on the other is the current "mess" with hope for the future and already a smaller number of victims than before. There is also the strategic benefit of a huge base in the middle of the enemy's countries.

Furthermore I have no particular reason to value American lives higher than Iraqi lives.I think for someone who has, it will be more difficult to make a rational decision.

Zoomba

on Aug 04, 2005

I say mess because if we pulled out completely right now, the whole thing would cave in on itself. Before the situation wasn't very nice with a dictator (an understatement) but it was largely stable. What we have now is a carefully built house of cards that we're starting to lay foundation around and are trying to build a more permenant structure around it. It's not something that could stand on its own right at this point... while we remain crucial to stability in the country, it will remain a "mess"

Dr Guy

on Aug 04, 2005

I say mess because if we pulled out completely right now, the whole thing would cave in on itself.

Damn! I am becoming Zoomba, because that is what I read into your article when I read it, and hence did not contest that point.

Leauki

on Aug 04, 2005

I don't think the dictatorship was so stable at all.

In fact, had the restrictions been lifted, like some in the UNSC proposed, we would have been where everything started.

Don't forget that the "stability" of the 90s was very expensive, in money and lives. And the 1980s situation, when the dictator attacked his neighbours (Iran for 8 or 9 years and then Kuwait) was hardly more stable than today's Iraq.

Zoomba

on Aug 05, 2005

Well, it was stable compared to what we have now... bombings in the streets, gunning down children at random etc.

I'm not saying the previous system was wonderful, or anything to that effect. What I am saying is that we went in and stirred things up, if we picked up and left, the situation would become horribly worse than it is even now. It's a mess because any semblance of stability is wholly dependent on our presence there currently.

Leauki

on Aug 05, 2005

Zoomba,

you are assuming that these things didn't happen under Saddam's rule. But considering the known numbers of deaths in Saddam's regime, I find it unlikely that none of Saddam's victims were gunned down at random. And even if none of them were, the deaths were still caused _somewhere_ in Iraq, under Saddam. Whether in camps or on the streets, it does not actually matter. Too much is too much.

If the US left now, whoever is strongest in Iraq, most likely the Ba'athists (who still have a power base in Syria) will take over. And Iraq would be back where it was before the invasion.

And after another ten years or so, it would be a danger to its neighbours again.

I think you are mixing up stability with a lack of information about the status. The major differences between Iraq now and before the invasion are two:

1. Fewer people die.

2. We hear about it more often.

The first is why the invasion was right.

The second is an effect of a journalist's liberty to report bad news without much danger of being killed for it.

Don't mistake information for fact! Information, if correct, is merely the facts that were possible to report. And the more stable a country is, the easier it is to report facts from it. That does indeed mean that bad news are good news; because it means the news made it out of the country alive...

Zoomba

on Aug 05, 2005

Well, we have to work with the information we have, anything else is just speculation and can't be used to make statements about how things are or aren't, how they were or weren't.

My point is that we're holding up the house of cards right now, that our presence there is necessary to keeping order.

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