Letter to the Editor: Iraq exit is the easy way out

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

In the coming months the choice will be yours. A variety of presidential candidates stand on both sides of the war: Should the US should work for peace or should we cut our losses? Please, make an informed decision looking forward and not an emotional one looking back to Bush’s deceit.

The war is certainly not a traditional war in which nationalities and battle lines are clearly drawn. Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds are set on the extermination of each other. The only thing obstructing complete ethnic cleansing is the presence of US forces.

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Looking into the future it’s not certain that withdrawal would save Americans.

What frightens me is that immediate history seems to be blinding us from the work that our country is doing. Our history is that we were deceived when we entered Iraq. The world was told we were entering for Weapons of mass destruction, and since we’ve discovered that much of the information delivered to the UN was a stretch of the truth.

We were deceived, and that hurts. It hurts because our friends and family were put in harm’s way and many died for reasons that don’t seem to hold up now. It hurts, but if we let our emotions stand in the way of the decisions that we will make, then we’re doomed to failure. When we choose how to move forward we must act with care, or we might make as rash of a decision in leaving as we made when entering Iraq.

The easy decision would be to leave quickly. Americans are heartbroken by our casualties and want an end. George Orwell said, “The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it,” and the peacekeeping our forces are doing is no different. The US envoy to Iraq warns that if such a pullout were to occur that Iraq would degrade into a civil war or worse. The entire region could be drawn in to the conflict that would kill countless Iraqis. The question is how many American deaths justify how many Iraqi deaths. If we consider all life to be equal then the US cannot even think about a withdrawal that will probably kill more Iraqis in a few months than the casualties our country would take in a year.

Looking into the future it’s not certain that withdrawal would save Americans. While this generation might be spared more bloodshed, the next generation could pay for a destabilized Iraq. If we leave and a regime supporting terrorism sprouts in our place then the battleground might move to our back yard.

Sincerely.

Dustin Grorud

Junior, aerospace engineering

Milbank, South Dakota

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