Sometimes the Movies Get it Right

Basically, it's about a fictional Army soldier uncovering the truth about the United States and their reasons for entering Iraq. His pursuit gets him into nothing but hot water and nearly gets him killed. At the end, he sends his personal account to all the world's major newspapers for them to publish.

Sounds real, doesn't it? I've always wondered what went wrong in the last eight years. When I was in middle school, the 'War on Terror' made its way to Iraq to depose Saddam Hussein and to find WMD's (Weapons of Mass Destruction). Eight years, countless billions of dollars, and thousands of lives later, what have we found? The answer is rather simple: nothing of value.

Ousting Saddam Hussein was something that needed to be done. A brutal Sunni tryrant ruling an overwhelming majority of Shiites and Kurds does not promote peace. With the thousands he had killed during his brutal reign, it was something that needed to be done sooner or later.

All the sanctions in the world wouldn't work without action to back them up, so the United States, as well as an international coalition, entered Iraq, defeated the Republican Guard, and captured Hussein. Sounds like a job well done, but not exactly. The Baath Party, which ruled Iraq under Hussein, was more or less destroyed and a new leadership was formed. However, such a process is more than painstaking and can prove to do little good.

The problem of Iraq became whether or not to install a democratic government or not, but how to pass it off to a group of people who really do not want your involvement in the political aftermath. You can't 'Americanize' a population, you really can't anything-ize a population because it's not your decision. I'll never forget in 'The Green Zone', where "Freddy" kills the former Iraqi General at the end of the movie, and then when asked why he did that, he says to Matt Damon's character, "It's not your choice to make." Freddy happens to be right. Handpicking a successor instead of giving the Iraqi's a choice is like trying to fit a size twelve shoe onto a size six foot, not matter how hard you try to push it, it won't happen.

When the idea of the possibility of WMD's is shoved down the throat of the public long enough, the masses will believe it. We bought into that hype and a few short months later, our forces were pulling down Saddam's statue in Tikrit, his hometown.

I myself was a believer too, in my youth. I sincerely believed that it was likely that there were WMD's in Iraq; their track record showed that it was certainly plausible. But the more we searched, everything came up empty. The question then became, 'Where did they go?' Right there is the problem; where they went is mostly irrelevant, aside from if said "missing" weapons got into the wrong hands. We should probably have stopped the search right then and there, perhaps even packed up and left. But their was a duty to be done now that the mess has been made, and right now we are sticking to that. Sooner or later, Iraq will have to fend for itself and I don't know if our actions left them capable of doing that any longer.

As fragile as that house of cards was, it stood prior to our intervention. Remove Saddam Hussein and the Baath party only, and there was still an infrastructure to fall back on. The nation could have still been salvaged through proper mediation. But this never happened; the international community pushed 'all-in' militarily but went bust on everything else.

Religion was the next hot topic, given the wide ideological and political gap between the two major factions (Sunnis and Shiites). Blacklisting the radicals on each side and find major commonalities between the Sunnis and Shiites would have gone a long way. Kurds are another issue and could be solved by allowing limited soverignty in their most populated areas. Sunnis and Shiites have had their issues since the first Battle of Karbala, but all is not lost.

What holds both factions back is the lack of a national identity. Develop the sense of secular unity, and what you have is a foundation more solid than the finest concrete. The religious identity can still exist, but the affiliation is more private.

Hell, we didn't even know exactly what we were going to war for. Promoting the virtues of democracy? More access to oil? Prove our role as an international peacekeeper? The list can go on and on but the fact of the matter is there wasn't a unified response by our camp.

There's still debates on why we are still in Iraq. This reponse is vague but at lease has a sense of unity; 'to protect our interests'. Personally, I would have never guessed that...

Whether we like it or not, this is becoming more and more like Vietnam. Unless something massive occurs, little can be done to salvage the situation. I'm not one to admit defeat easily, but this is an exception.

It really does not matter what technology you have available, opposition forces in Iraq will fight until the bitter end. Muslim armies in general are known for their resilience against overwhelming odds. Just take a look at their past conflicts and it does not bode well for their opponents.

• Crusades (did not go so well for Christians)
• Afghanistan (against the Soviets, and us for that matter)
• Algeria (against the French)

The only way that the fighting will stop is if they know that something will be in it for them through the peace process. There will be no surrender by the insurgents until then; even that may not be enough. There are three ways out now.

1. Fix the broken steps - rework the entire political system to make it compatible for Iraqis with a system made by Iraqis. The U.S. should only mediate the talks, not superimpose ideals on them.

2. Leave - People will say that we gave up and left, but every party is war weary whether they'll admit it or not. Sometimes you just have to cut your losses.

3. Total War - Finish the fight and crush the opposition. This step cannot happen if Iraq is to be saved. It can only end badly.