by Zach Bigalke

Created on: May 06, 2007   Last Updated: October 03, 2010

We will win this war unless we surrender. To walk away would provide a solid foundation for terrorist organizations to spread their tentacles through the Arab world. Iran will be emboldened to the point of Armageddon. You are either for the troops or against the troops. You are either for the president's policies or you are for the terrorists' policies.

This baloney has been shoveled down the throats of the American public for far too long. The greatest thing that this war in Iraq has done is to force every American - military, civilian, political, rural, urban, religious, secular - to begin the process of self-audit to detect our collective flaws and begin the path toward a new dawn. A new worldview, a new leadership, a new focus. This path of evaluation is painful and stark, an indication of how far we as a society have strayed from the ideals that we preach internationally.

The Army released a report 04 May 2007 which revealed the acrid depths of the inferno into which our military morals have plummeted. One in three of the 1767 troops surveyed last fall revealed that they approved of torture if it would help gather insurgent information. Ten percent stated that they had personally caused undue harm to civilian populations, destroying private property or assaulting civilians. Half the Army personnel surveyed stated that they would not turn in a fellow soldier for harming the civilian populace; two-thirds of the Marines questioned confirmed this trend. In the frank language of the Army report, "Less than half of Soldiers and Marines believed that non-combatants should be treated with dignity and respect."

The combination of a gross lack of military ethics coupled with repeated extensions of soldiers' tours of duty are a significant reason why we are losing in Iraq. We can pour as much or as little money into the military as we wish; until our government learns how to train its men and women in uniform to conduct their duty with dignity, the United States will never achieve its stated goals in Iraq.

We went into the nation as liberators. A repressive regime was going to tumble finally. George the Second would atone for the oversights of his father. The reservations of his father's Cabinet, largely represented in the son's as well, would not hinder the Decider from rushing bullheaded forward blindly into the red flag. Toro! But, from the beginning, too many blunders would steer an uncorrectable path toward failure. Too few troops rushed into battle too quickly

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