Honor and Humility: Accepting Responsibility for the Iraq War

The debate on the war in Iraq has taken a disturbing turn. We are no longer discussing the morality of the war and the occupation. Rather, we are engaged in a battle of words, terminology, definitions and semantics.

Words are important. They shape our thoughts and provide a context within which all sides of an issue are interpreted. When the occupying forces insisted on calling a legitimate resistance movement "terrorists" and "Saddam Loyalists" it was designed to distort reality and frame the debate. During the initial stages of the war, from Shock and Awe to the Fallujah massacre and beyond, when major American media outlets bombarded us with slogans such as "The Battle for Iraq" and "The Fight for Iraqi Freedom" it was a naked attempt to sanctify the American cause.

Now we are witnessing a heated intellectual debate over whether the term "Civil War" is an accurate description of the events on the ground and I say: It no longer matters. Whether we accept or reject the term, every individual with open eyes can acknowledge that reality in occupied Iraq, with its daily bloodshed, tortured and decapitated bodies, hundreds of thousands dead and countless refugees, is hell on earth.

Giving it a name does not lessen our sense of horror or remove us from the responsibility of having created this reality by an unjustified act of war.

We have unleashed this horror upon the world by committing the cardinal war crime: an aggressive war against a nation that posed no threat to us or our allies. That we did so by deliberate deception with malice aforethought is the only conclusion available to any objective observer.

That we are ultimately accountable for all that has befallen the nation formerly known as Iraq cannot and should not be questioned. To retreat behind the neocon mythology that our intentions were noble but the plan was flawed would accelerate our moral decline and doom us to further travesties.

We attempted to legitimize the very concept of aggressive war and the entire world should be grateful that we failed.

Once we accept our responsibility in creating this nightmare, we can begin to see a way out. Once we accept that our blind madness brought this scourge on an undeserving land and an innocent people, we can begin to redefine ourselves by rediscovering our true and better nature.

The occupied can never accept the nobility of the occupier.

We have not only lost the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people; we have lost their trust irrevocably.

What we do now – now that we know that the war that should never have been fought is lost, now that we know our soldiers are trapped in the hell of our leaders’ making – will define us as much as the war, itself, and the decisions that landed us in this dilemma of mass destruction.

When we accept the dark realities that placed us here, we will understand at once that we cannot right what we have wronged by further acts of war and destruction.

Our soldiers have no mission. We have no one to fight for and no one to fight against. Though they remain only a fraction of the resistance, we brought Al Qaeda into this fight but we are unable to distinguish foreign fighters from the Iraqi resistance. We cannot stand between two warring factions when both are perfectly willing to turn their guns on a common enemy: the occupying army.

We have no choice but to get out.

We should pull our troops back out of harm’s way and announce unequivocally our withdrawal within 4-6 months. We should accelerate negotiations and open the process to all parties that may play a role in defusing conflicts and easing the transition to true sovereignty – a nation or nations free of occupation.

Will the violence increase or decrease as a result of our withdrawal?

In all honesty, we may never know the answer to that question. We do know that the violence has only increased under the occupation. We know that every political and military action we have taken has served to fuel the fires of resistance and further divide the Iraqi people. We know that the occupation, under any terms or strength of force, is not a solution. It is the seed, root and core of the disaster.

We owe it to the people of Iraq, the people who have suffered immeasurably by our misguided and criminal actions, to do everything we can to achieve compromises and agreements that have nothing to do with American interests and everything to do with peaceful resolution of conflicts and grievances.

The question that remains is: Will we remain as committed to rebuilding Iraq from the outside as we were to destroying Iraq from the inside?

Our history argues against us but history is best served when it functions as a lesson rather than an inescapable trap.

It is our solemn responsibility to do so. We have it in our power to rebuild the bridges we have burned with reckless abandon.

We took a first step in restoring our reputation in the world by electing a new congress. Beyond ending the Iraq War and resolving the ongoing tragedy in Afghanistan, the next step will be to elect a new president who will thoroughly and unashamedly repudiate the policies of the Bush White House.

No one knows better than our president does how difficult it is to accept hard realities and to take the burden of responsibility on our shoulders but in the case of Iraq, both the lives of our soldiers and the soul of the nation requires just that.

Jazz.

JACK RANDOM IS THE AUTHOR OF THE JAZZMAN CHRONICLES (CROW DOG PRESS) AND GHOST DANCE INSURRECTION (DRY BONES PRESS). THE CHRONICLES HAVE APPEARED ON THE ALBION MONITOR, PEACE-EARTH-JUSTICE, THE NATIONAL FREE PRESS, LEFTWARD, DISSIDENT VOICE AND COUNTERPUNCH. Random Voices