By Brady Davidson | Business Manager
The War on Terror in the Middle-East has exhausted not only our nation’s military, but our political influence around the world. The eight-year long war has cost the United States 1.2 trillion dollars and about 10,000 casualties. I believe that we must rethink our strategy in the war. We have seen no progress in eliminating a threat, which controversially was not there to begin with. We must reevaluate our strategy by looking back at what was wrong in the first place.
When we first entered the war in 2003, many people jumped on George W. Bush’s bandwagon of fighting a terrorist threat in a foreign country; however, to this day, many people continue to believe we are making a difference in the area and “fighting the good fight.” The objective of Operation Iraqi Freedom was to remove the terrorist threat in the area, search and remove all Weapons of Mass Destruction, and install a democratic government. The basis of this attack is flawed even on the very surface.
Despite the numerous times the Iraqi government claimed in front of the U.N. Security Council that they were not harboring any WMD, and the 12 month search the U.N. initiated came back with no findings, the U.S. still went ahead and launched a full attack in search of them. To this day we have not found one weapon. This failure alone changed the U.S. standpoint as troops steadily poured from Iraq into Afghanistan.
The same goes for the idea of installing democracy in a foreign country. Everyone knows that democracies do not fight with democracies; it is the fundamental idea of U.S. diplomacy. However, can there really be a militarily occupied democracy? The very idea of that is an oxymoron. By forcing an idea on a people, one is denying their right choose their own destiny, which is the complete opposite of democracy. The only way for both Iraq and Afghanistan to become a democracy is if the U.S. pulls out and lets the people take the action for the government.
The biggest flaw in the U.S. plan is the fact that the main target, Al-Qaeda, was never in Iraq or Afghanistan. The resistance we fought in Iraq and are fighting in Afghanistan is not terrorists; the majority of them are nationalists. They were just patriots protecting their country from foreign invaders, the same way any of us would if we were being attacked on our own soil. Al-Qaeda is based in Pakistan, Yemen and Saudi Arabia, not in the areas where the U.S. is operating
From these three points alone, one can see a very strong reason why the U.S. needs to re-evaluate the real strategy for the war in the Middle-East, or pull out all together. Our presence in the region is the reason why there is such turmoil. We are tainting the ideas of democracy and scaring off future development in the world.
