by Elton Gahr

Created on: February 03, 2009

The question of if we should leave Iraq has to go back to the reasons that we went in. There are still many people who believe that the entire point of going into Iraq were weapons of mass destruction, and since they haven't been found it would be the correct decision to leave if that had been the primary reason for going to Iraq, but as anyone who cares to look can easily find there were over twenty reason listed as to why we should change the government in Iraq and only one of them were weapons of mass destruction.

The others including shooting at American aircraft, attacks against Kurdish civilians, the attempted assassination of a former United States President, and the support of terrorist bombers such as giving large amount of money to the families of those who perpetrated terrorist acts. There has been considerable improvement in the government of Iraq those advances could easily be lost if the United States were to leave.

The arguments against continuing the war are mostly economic. With a downturn in the economy it has become more difficult to spend the money, but those arguments do not pass muster. The government will continue to spend money on the military regardless of whether we leave Iraq or not but if we leave we will lose the considerable amounts of money which have been spent on the military bases as well as ensuring that the Iraqi people will never repay us any of the money we have spent on their liberation. More importantly, there have been numerous cases of military spending helping the economy the most dramatic being world war 2 which many believe is one of the major reasons for the end of the Great Depression.

Finally we must ask ourselves what the most likely outcome of the United States leaving Iraq is. it is almost certain that the country would break into two parts the Kurds declaring their own Independence. The Iraq government would be unable to do anything about it. At first that may seem like a minor thing, but there is a considerable Kurd population in Turkey, and as such they would be forced to intervene or risk a civil war. This will itself be dangerous because we will risk losing an important ally in that part of the world but it won't be the only consequence.

Assuming that Iran or one of Iraq's other neighbors don't take over Iraq and form a larger more dangerous country which we will be forced to spend even more money to fight again in ten years, the country will almost certainly have a strongman take over and every gain we have made in the views of the middle east will be lost.

Perhaps one day we will be able to change the middle east into something we like better, but as it is now the people are far too used to submitting to the strongest tribe, and we have began to convince them that we are that tribe after years of struggle. How much more difficult will that be if we leave with our tail between our legs?

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