Reply #67: Ok but let's not let ourselves or allow the American people

[AndyS40]

to be kidded:

Staying in Iraq when the overwhelming majority of the population wants us to leave makes this a situation not of liberation, not protecting freedom, not supporting an ally, but the NECESSARILY BRUTAL occupation of a country that never attacked us, plain and simple.

What we need to do is articulate the relevant principles most Americans believe America stands for:

America is not Ancient Rome.
America is not Nazi Germany.
America is not the Soviet Union.

We don't have a view of the world which allows us to subjugate it to our military will, which we couldn't do even if we wanted to. Without the justifications (lies) that have fallen by the wayside, the last remaining intellectual justifications of occupying that country are against everything America stands for. And American troops are DYING FOR THIS?

What Democratic justifiers of continuing occupation want to do is fix what Bush has broken. While the motive is something I can respect, the backdrop of broken principles is something I cannot.

You cannot IMPOSE freedom in an environment in which the very principles of freedom and truth themselves have inherently been flouted. No Imperial Occupation of a foreign country has ever succeeded in doing that. The best that can be achieved is to impose ORDER, TEMPORARILY. And imposing ORDER for its own sake is the type of justification that the worst vile regimes in world history might have been proud of.

Look at what the Bush administration has been doing. It says it supports a free press, and it does this with lies and dishonesty. It pays people to plant stories. This is not how you support a free press. The Bush administration says it supports Freedom(tm) and Democracy(tm). But it ignores the will of the Iraqi people just as it ignores the will of the American people.

And indeed, the imposition of "freedom" has not been happening. Our troops have been dying to establish an Iranian style Islamic Republic that has nothing to do with Democracy or anything we stand for. Our troops didn't go to Iraq to turn Iraq into Iran.

DEMOCRACY is the will of the vast majority of the Iraqi people asking us to LEAVE. If you respect DEMOCRACY, if DEMOCRACY is what you want to fight for, the only thing you CAN do is LEAVE.