by James Glaser
June 11, 2003

No American can believe that the citizens of Iraq and Afghanistan can feel free, as long as their are thousands of armed foreign troops dictating everything they are allowed to do. Those armed foreign troops imposing their will on these oppressed people are the soldiers of the United States of America.

While I was in high school there was a after school fight between a big football player and a thin studious kid. After just a few minutes the big guy was on top, punching that little fellow. That kid on the bottom would not quit and after just a few minutes he had blackened the big guy's eyes and bloodied his nose. For sure that little guy was pummeled badly, but he got up with dignity and that big guy never took him on again.

It seems to me that this same scenario is going on in Iraq and Afghanistan today. We are the big guy that was going to bring liberation and democracy to these two countries. We had our fight with each, but neither will give up. Eight Americans killed in eight days in Iraq and this, weeks after President Bush declared the fight over. The same thing in Afghanistan, only, George declared that one over last year. Still those Afghans will not quit and five peace keepers were killed and twenty some wounded this week.

The whole world is watching what we are doing in these two nations today and you know that many snicker as they watch us make one bad move after another. In Afghanistan we had to bellow and threaten for weeks before we attacked. This show of how powerful we were before attacking, allowed both Osama bin Laden, the head of al Qaeda and Mulla Omar, the head of the Taliban to get their families safely out of the country and plan their own escape.

It was almost the same thing in Iraq. Saddam Hussein and his family had months if not years to plan their getaway.

The sad and sorry part of this, is how America has treated the people of these two countries that we told the world we were bringing freedom to. The Afghan people are still under the heel of the War Lords that the United States has hired to control every district of that nation, while leaving the Capitol under the control of the puppet we installed as President. The Opium trade, crime, and the return of banditry are now the commerce of Afghanistan, the very things that the Taliban and Mulla Omar outlawed.

In Iraq things are not any better. Electricity and thus clean drinking water is an intermittent commodity. What many don't understand is that once the water pipes are filled with sewage contaminated water, any clean water now produced and run through those same pipes, is contaminated too.

Looting and lawlessness is still rampant in Iraq. Hospitals are still seeing over a thousand sick children every day and unemployment is the norm. The United States has put Saddam Hussein on the run and he is in hiding someplace, but every day the people of Iraq look at his picture on their money. America is still printing Saddam bank notes until a new government can be put in place, which by our own account might take months.

In both of these countries, the United states was supposed to let the people run their own lives after we removed the regimes we felt were bad for them. In Iraq, Liberation was to allow the people of Iraq, to form their own government and rebuild their country.

Other nations watch and see that we are treating the Iraqi people much like Saddam did. We build them television stations, but Americans control what is allowed to be broadcast. The United States has picked those Iraqis that we deem good enough to help run the country. Today Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld stated that the lawlessness in Iraq will last at least three more months. Iraq is out of our control and with a Soldier a day getting killed and attacks on American troops coming from every quarter, civil law has been put on the back burner.

The US Army's 3rd Infantry Division is not going home like they were told after their battle success. That is because the plans for postwar Iraq were deficient. People in the rest of the world see what is happening to the Iraqi and Afghan people because their media reports any American problems, while our media keeps the focus on Martha Stewart and a killing in California. Iraq and Afghanistan are old stories in the United states and the killing of an American soldier doesn't even make the front page any more.

No one even talks about the lack of an exit strategy for either of these countries and no body even mentions the billions of dollars we are spending in each.

The American Citizen has to wake up to the fact that we are writing bad checks in order to keep the Iraqi and Afghan people under our heel. We also must realize that the rest of the world knows what is going on in both of these countries even though the majority of our own citizens do not.

Our children and our grandchildren will be paying for George W. Bush's wars for their whole lives. American Soldiers will continue to be killed until we are driven out of these countries. Both of these nations want to be liberated and free. They can't be free until they drive our occupying Army from their soil. They know that, the rest of the world knows that, and we are about to learn that.