Is the war over? President Barack Obama is reportedly pulling the US troops out of Iraq after more than seven years on the battlefield. Polls show that the American public’s support for the invasion of Iraq has declined during this time – though of course some of the non-supporters opposed the war from the beginning and did not “convert” to the other side. As someone who is part American myself (my mother is from Wisconsin ), I have always been against the war, albeit as an isolationist rather than a pacifist. However oppressive Saddam Hussein may have been towards his own people, he posed no threat to the United States . His much-feared (and much-doubted) stockpile of nuclear weapons never materialized. Hence the premise for the war was based on a non-reality at best and a deliberate falsehood at worst. Nor were Hussein’s alleged links to al-Qaeda or other Islamic fundamentalist groups ever proven; for one thing, religion did not play any part in his government.
Watching the military endeavour in Iraq was painful at times: the mistreatment of prisoners of war and the spectre of young men – and some young women – returning to the United States physically or, perhaps even worse, psychologically damaged by the fighting come to mind as prime examples. In coldly materialistic terms, the war has ended up costing an enormous amount of money. And for what, I wonder: a country halfway around the world that really had nothing to do with the US and the everyday lives of ordinary Americans.
On the other hand, I’m not totally comfortable with the anti-war faction. It was to a certain degree taken over by those who saw the war as a Western imperialist venture. For instance, in The Walrus magazine commentator Tariq Ali described the abuse of Iraqi detainees by American forces as “Western civilization at its rawest.” A reader cleverly pointed out afterwards in a letter to the editor that many Western nations, including the United States ’ NAFTA partners Canada and Mexico , declined to join the war effort. Likewise, one pacifist website accused the Roman Catholic Church of not speaking out as loudly against the war as they do against abortion because Iraqi children were not “White” – a curious leap of logic given that the Catholic Church condemned US intervention in Iraq from the very start. Unfortunately, the anti-colonialist kooks diminished the anti-war movement’s credibility.
To conclude, I hope this war is really over. I am proud as a Canadian that Canada never took part in it – no matter how much Stephen Harper was accused of being a Bush toady, he made no move to send Canadian troops to Iraq . And fingers crossed that the troops will come home once and for all.
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