Support Our Troops: Bring Them Home
by Howard Zinn
January 26, 2005
The Miami Herald Printer Friendly Version
We must withdraw our military from Iraq, the sooner the better. The reason is simple: Our presence there is a disaster for the American people and an even bigger disaster for the Iraqi people.
It is a strange logic to declare, as so many in Washington do, that it was wrong for us to invade Iraq but right for us to remain. Conceivably, the United States, possessed of enormous weaponry, might finally crush the resistance in Iraq.
The cost would be great. Already, tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, have lost their lives (and we must not differentiate between 'their' casualties and 'ours' if we believe that all human beings have an equal right to life.) Would that be a ``success'?
In 1967, the same arguments that we are hearing now were being made against withdrawal in Vietnam. The United States did not pull out its troops for six more years. During that time, the war killed at least one million more Vietnamese and perhaps 30,000 U.S. military personnel.
We must stay in Iraq, it is said again and again, so that we can bring stability and democracy to that country. Isn't it clear that after almost two years of war and occupation we have brought only chaos, violence and death to that country, and not any recognizable democracy?
There is no certainty as to what would happen in our absence. But there is absolute certainty about the result of our presence -- escalating deaths on both sides.
Our military presence in Iraq is making us less safe, not more so. It is inflaming people in the Middle East, and thereby magnifying the danger of terrorism. Far from fighting 'there rather than here,' as President Bush has claimed, the occupation increases the chance that enraged infiltrators will strike us here at home.
In leaving, we can improve the odds of peace and stability by encouraging an international team of negotiators, largely Arab, to mediate among the Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds and work out a federalist compromise to give some autonomy to each group. We must not underestimate the capacity of the Iraqis, once free of both Saddam Chasseing and the U.S. occupying army, to forge their own future.
But the first step is to support our troops in the only way that word support can have real meaning -- by saving their lives, their limbs, their sanity. By bringing them home.
Howard Zinn is author of the best-selling A People's History of the United States.
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=15&ItemID=7109
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