KA24DESOneThree

Let's call this what it is: a failed intervention into a country that we had no business in, prolonged because we didn't want to lose face.

To the immediate skeptics: We're not currently involved? Are you kidding? Hundreds (to thousands, again depending on the source) of those killed were killed by US air strikes, and who knows how many were wounded. We currently have at least 1500 troops in Iraq as of mid-December, with 630 in an advise and assist role and 870 in a training role.

The death toll for civilians ranges from 12,000 to 17,000 depending on whose numbers you trust- the title was using NATO numbers. An additional 4,000-30,000 combatants were killed during the year- the number spread is huge but there really is no way to accurately whittle it down.

12,000 people doesn't seem like much, in the overall scheme of things, but it would be the equivalent of a quarter of my town.

The funny thing is that this kind of violence didn't happen on a large scale in modern times until after the Sykes-Picot agreement and, after that, the formation of the modern state of Israel. [I'm skipping a decade and a half here] The Sunni and Shia sects experienced a short period of increased positive relations in the '60s but this was destroyed by the Iranian Revolution. We fanned the flames of that revolution, which we didn't want, just like we fanned the flames of the '53 coup, which we did want. It just got worse from there.

Our involvement in the Middle East has been nothing short of disaster. We shot down a civilian airliner (Iran Air Flight 655, shot down from within Iranian waters by the USS Vincennes [saber rattlers for war with Russia, here is your hypocrisy]), forgave military action against our ships when it suited us (USS Liberty in '67 [Israeli action] and USS Stark in '87 [Iraqi action]) and generally meddled in business that was not ours. Hell, when we shot down Flight 655, we thought it was a goddamn F14 that we had sold to Iran before the revolution.

We played both sides in the Iran-Iraq war, giving Saddam live and reproducing cultures of easily-weaponized microorganisms (like anthrax and the bubonic plague, while also giving him satellite intel on where to deliver the resulting biological weapons) while selling arms to Iran so we could fund a drug war (which the President was lying to us about, before he wasn't) at the same time. We also supported Hussein despite his anti-Shia views, his anti-Kurd views, and his belief that Persians were inferior- of course, this was about ten years after we'd supported the Kurds during the Second Kurdish-Iraqi War and the Iranians pre-Revolution but post-Coup.

This isn't high school, and we aren't playing favorites to see who gets elected class president. There are lives at stake and our government continues to bloody its hands and the entire Western establishment continues to consider the Middle East (excluding the rich, sandy oil ones) as backward- even though we've done all we can to continue their tailspin into violence and sectarianism.

This is a plea, yes. A plea that no one in this country vote for war again. Not a hypocritical retaliatory war, not a war to protect a people, not a war to stop a war. OT: All wars we've entered in recently have been quagmires, misdirection, criminal or some mixture of the three. Have you read Herbert Hoover's notes on the lead-up to WWII? The truth about the Gulf of Tonkin incident? It's all lies and bullshit sold to us, and we, being the patriots that we are, press for attack and raise our hackles in anger and open our pocketbooks in red-white-and-blue fervor.

One cannot free a people by enslaving them. We removed the Iraqi people from a dictator's grasp and delivered them into the grasp of hatred, divisiveness and violence. Look up the number of suicide bombings in Iraq (and Afghanistan) before we got involved in those areas. Look at where the money comes from- our "allies" Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait and the UAE. The West is so goddamn busy making money hand-over-fist selling weapons and training to those four oil-rich countries to give a flying funk about truly helping Iraq or Afghanistan.

One also cannot enact righteous retribution by killing the innocent, even accidentally; it creates a chain with the end result being injustice. We were involved with and gave knowledge to multiple groups involved in airliner bombings and shootdowns ourselves- to start a war over what happened on 9/11/01 is preposterous and absurd. Our hypocrisy is showing.

Wake up, people. Your government is using you as pawns in a dangerous game, and if you don't vote to kick them out, or take steps to remove their funding, you're complicit. If you served in, or voted for, wars before you knew all the facts, you're complicit. I have blood on my hands and I can't scrub it off, so every day I go out there and I fight against war, against intervention, against theft, against robbery, against the government. That is my payment and my offering of contrition.