Can foreigners military intervention win the peace in Iraq or can only the Iraqis make this happen?

Iraqis

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by Melissa Arnold

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An Uncivil War?

"I find it helpful during my time in Iraq to reflect on our own history," states Ryan Croker, U.S. Ambassador to Iraq. "At many points in our early years, our survival as a nation was questionable.
Our efforts to build the institutions of government were not always successful in the first instance and universal suffrage, civil rights and state rights were only resolved after acrimonious debate and sometimes violence." While the American government does not apply the words civil war' to Iraq, they often compare our nation's earliest challenges to Iraq's current situation.

Although our laws and government were established through trial and error, America never had an occupying force within its borders when the Civil War took place. The Second Confiscation Act of the Emancipation Proclamation states: "That if any person shall hereafter incite, set on foot, assist or engage in any rebellion or insurrection against the authority of the United States or the laws thereof, such a person shall be punished by imprisonment for a period not exceeding ten years, or by a fine not exceeding ten thousand dollars, and by the liberation of all his slaves, if any he have; or by both of said punishments, at the discretion of the court." While this law applied the U.S. citizens, it also implicated the involvement of other countries as well. Regardless, the pulse of every strong nation beats within the hearts of citizens who fought for their own independence and won liberation.

During our own Revolution, American men and women were seen as terrorist and rebels in the eyes of Britain. American citizens used guerrilla tactics to ambush British convoys and attack their camps.
Men and women of all ages, who were capable of bearing arms, sabotaged the infrastructure of an organized military to break Britain's grasp on our country. Children became freedom fighters or Minutemen and we praise them still as patriots. The parallels to Iraq are amazing, especially when our own camps and convoys are constantly under attack by various tribes and militant groups. Rebels' pretending to be allies infiltrate our bases and the similarities do not stop there.

Many of the things we try to build or fix are oftentimes destroyed. These very schools, hospitals, bridges, roads, utility stations, and oil refineries that benefit the Iraqi people become targets for terrorism, in hopes that we might give up and leave some day. How long will it be before everyone forgets what they are fighting for? How many years of dying will it take for us to realize how insignificant our reasons for waging war really are? Real culprits run free while world powers refuse to sit down and compromise a peaceable regime change between two battling parties and a third faction which wants nothing to do with either of them.
Is our involvement only prolonging the union of a people whose cultural lifestyles and ways of thinking are completely foreign to us?

Virtually every other war we fought and won upon foreign soil, ridded another country of an unwanted occupier. Now we have become the occupying force, standing upon the very lines which divide denominations in a holy war older than the very country we founded. If genocide had truly been our reason for this invasion, then the American government should have brought more proof of this to the nations who refused to back us in the beginning. Just as our allies were skeptical about our lack of evidence concerning non-existent weapons of mass destruction, many saw oil as our single most motivating factor for the war. I know that Saddam Hussein had undoubtedly been a tyrant to his people, but most of these issues were dealt with after the Gulf War. Iran
and other countries are still guilty of the exact same crimes against humanity, while Sudan's civil war and subsequent genocide continues to add to a death toll already said to be in the millions.

North Korea, North Vietnam, China, and other communist countries still employ cruel and unusual punishment while executing their citizens for the very freedoms we enjoy. We say we want to spread democracy yet our leaders refuse to engage in diplomacy as a world effort. We act alone even when the U.N. asks us to remain uninvolved. Ill-equipped and unprepared we jump headlong into religious conflict, planning only to model another government after our own. When their children pick up arms against us we call it terrorism instead of patriotism, then demonize every messenger that delivers a message we dislike. Anyone opposed to the war is called unpatriotic. Those who don't support sending more funds, when billions of dollars remain unaccounted for, are blamed for not supporting our troops. Anyone who expresses an opinion in favor of pulling out of Iraq is called a cut-and-runner. So many want to stay till we finish the job, yet some tasks are as endless as Vietnam surely would have been if we stayed to finish what we had begun there.

We as a nation need to remember the very foundations upon which this country was founded. We would have never stood for it if another government had tried to change the course of our nation's birth when we in the beginning stages of winning our own freedom. We must teach and not preach democracy, then let the people decide how to govern themselves.
History is recorded so we might remember and learn from our mistakes, rather than repeating our previous failures.
It should never be used as an excuse to impose someone's way of life upon other people. It worries me when our Ambassador to Iraq
says, "Such ideas are not always universal, but their application will be." Just because something works for one individual does not mean it is right for everyone. I believe that true peace only comes with a willingness to accept diplomacy through trial and error. Government can never be forced if it is expected to work, because in the end it is the people who truly decided how they want to be ruled.

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