War

Battlefield: 21 Days on the Empire's Edge

I just finished watching the end of it. It's a documentary on the war in Iraq. One of the interviewers was an Iraqi man who had fought against Hussein's faction and fled to America. He was returning home after many years to see his family. The other interviewer was a woman who I didn't learn that much about, but her translator was also a woman, an Iraqi woman. Having the two viewpoints gave the film more perspective.

I liked the film because the news we get here in America is so sketchy, and by sketchy I mean biased and skewed. I like to hear the soldiers talk and I like to hear the Iraqi people talk. Politicians and foreign correspondents I can do without.

I am not going to transcribe the entire film but one scene especially stood out to me.

A large group of Iraqi men are gathered around the camera and they are stating their various grievences (as any person whose homeland is being ravaged by war would) and one man states, "There is one god, and America is the enemy of Islam." This then becomes a chant accompanied by clapping and shouting. The camera pans back and there are American soldiers standing nearby on picket duty. They're interested in the crowd, but not nearly as interested as I bet they would be if they had subtitles popping up in their goggles like I did on my tv screen.

Pull out of Iraq? Don't pull out of Iraq? America will be fighting the war on terror, somewhere, long after I am dead and buried. "There is one god and America is the enemy of Islam." We can pull out of Iraq, but we will be fighting somewhere else soon after and it will be worse.

I grieve for the loss of life, both American and Iraqi, that the war has caused. I read the names of the soldiers who have died, ninety percent of whom are younger than I am, and I think of their families, their mothers and wives and kids.

I honor our men and women in the military for making the ultimate sacrifice. They bleed for us. They go out to fight so the enemy does not come in again and kill thousands more innocents.

Iraq or Illinois, where would we rather the war take place? The fighting will continue, one place or another. The question is, would pulling out of Iraq make an already bad situtation worse?