People die in Iraq every day. Not, of course, merely for the reasons people die everywhere, but because insurgents want to kill people. They want to kill American soldiers and those of the Sunni or Shia persuasion. That’s not news anymore. It’s just a sad fact of life.
We could spend the twenty years debating whose fault it all is and how (or whether) to try to fix it. Every day the television is filled with politicians, pundits and religious leaders who have opinions on Iraq. Google pulls up 17,800,000 hits when you type in Iraq opinions. But all these opinions aren’t helping, are they?
Allegedly we want Iraq to become a democracy. Why don’t we start now? We’re so proud of the Democratic elections that were held, so why don’t we try a national referendum? Why don’t we ask the Iraqi people whether they want more troops, no troops, etc.? It’s their lives that are most affected (in addition to lives of our servicepeople and their families, of course, but our elected officials don’t seem too concerned about them) by this war.
Does anyone think what’s going on in Iraq is a nation governed by the people and for the people?
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2 users commented in " Democracy. . .there’s an idea. "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackJerseygirl - I like the way you’ve taken this to a human level.
Great read.
Democracy in Iraq and the Middle East has always been a problem for our government, because it would undermine our ‘national interest’ for Iraq to be sovereign and democratic. We would let Iraqi people have the choice, but since Iraq has a Shiite majority, closer ties with Iran would probably be preferred by popularly-elected officials. Also, I think the majority of people would want us to leave, and our government does not want to do that, obviously. So democracy in Iraq is “democracy if and only if…”, which, if you think about it, isn’t really democracy at all.
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