If We Leave Now, We Go Out As Winners

by James Glaser
July 3, 2003

But if we stay, there is a good chance we lose George Bush's war in Iraq. Just like President Lyndon Baines Johnson didn't want to lose a war, President George W. Bush fears that same thing.

On tape President Johnson told his Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara that we could not win this war (Vietnam) and he kept us there while twenty thousand more Americans died. The numbers in Iraq are not the same except to the mothers and fathers of those Marines and Soldiers that are dying there every day we stay in that country.

We told the world we were going to Iraq to liberate the Iraqi people from Saddam Hussein and we did that. We told the world we were going to Iraq to get rid of their Weapons of Mass Destruction and we now know our intelligence was faulty on that score. Washington's fear of those weapons should now be over and that excuse is gone. We told the world we didn't want Iraq's oil, but that is the only thing we have saved in the whole country.

The Iraqi people are now under the heel of American troops and feeling just like every European Country after Hitler took over theirs. Just because a soldier has an American flag on his shoulder, he isn't any less menacing on your corner in full battle dress or when he knocks down your door looking for weapons.

Body searches of Iraqi wives and daughters are the same coming from American troops as they would be coming from Nazi Storm Troopers. Americans do not understand this because we have never lived under occupation and I pray we never will. Every man in Iraq is humiliated by our troops and that humiliation turns to hate any time an American trooper treats them with no respect.

We told the world we were going to Iraq to help those people and we are now killing them. For three months the five million citizens of Baghdad have had no clean drinking water or electricity to power air conditioners and fans. Baghdad was not some mud hut third world capitol, no it was a modern city with many hospitals, universities, and maybe the best infrastructure of any Arab metropolis.

We destroyed all of that. We bombed some hospitals and cut electrical power from the rest and to this day no hospital can plan on having electrical power for a full twenty four hours. They are lucky to get eight uninterrupted hours.

Three months later and people are still getting drinking water tainted with sewage. Most government records like birth certificates, marriage records, land ownership records, and proof of eligibility for pensions were burned in the looting after we took over Baghdad.

Three months later and there is still no effective police force, there is over 50% unemployment, crime is everywhere, and in a city of five million there is no garbage pickup. Our occupying troops are every where brandishing weapons, American tanks are rolling through town, firearms and explosions from grenades can be heard daily.

Now Washington can't understand why the Iraqi people want us to leave. We have killed thousands of innocent Iraqi people, many of them children and Washington hasn't a clue on what is going wrong. Washington thinks more foreign troops from other countries will make everything better.

The one example of things working that Washington shows the world is the Iraqi oil industry that we saved for them. We now have that pumping and wonder why the Iraqi people would sabotage the pipe line and blow up pumping stations.

The rest of the world knows that America can take on any nation and in a matter of weeks defeat them as we did Iraq, but they also know that all people love freedom and they will fight us as long as we are in their country. During World War II, in every occupied country that the Nazis captured, a resistance movement soon started and they were still fighting occupation years later, when the United States came to push Hitler's troops out.

That is what is happening in Iraq today. A resistance is starting by the people of Iraq that love freedom. Washington will tell you that it is the people who still back Saddam that are killing our troops. I think it is the parents of the children we killed and the parents of the children dying every day from the water born diseases they get from the drinking water.

I think the husbands, brothers, and sons of the wives, sisters, and daughters getting groped in searches by Americans, are killing our troops. I think the Iraqi getting angry when he sees our troops every where, is killing our troops. I think the people of Iraq that have waited for freedom for the thirty five years Saddam was in power are not ready to give their freedom to us and they are killing our troops.

We leave now and we can tell the world we won. That is so very important to George Bush as it was to Lyndon Johnson. George can tell the world that he liberated the Iraqi people and that would be true. George Bush would be the Commander in Chief of a victorious Army and he could strut all the way to the next election.

We stay and George Bush becomes Iraq's new Saddam Hussein. The Iraqi people would rather their dictator be an Iraqi than an American President. We will continue to lose troops until we leave, because the people of Iraq have learned to hate us and now all the problems in their lives are caused by us. We can't change that as we have killed too many innocent people and hurt tens of thousands more.

All we can do now to save some sort of victory, is leave.