Abstract

Why We Must Leave Iraq

The article discusses whether the United States should pull its troops out of Iraq as of October 2004. The United States should just pull out of Iraq. The United States should never have invaded Iraq. Now it should set a timetable to withdraw and leave. The war would have been an even greater mistake if the reasons given for it had been based on reality--if the weapons of mass destruction and ties to Al Qaeda had existed. There might have been a use of weapons of mass destruction against American troops in the Iraq theater, or even on U.S. soil, and a possible use of nuclear weapons by the United States in retaliation. The United States is a radicalizing force in Iraq. The more the United States pursues the goal of a democratic Iraq, the farther it recedes into the distance. If the people of Iraq slip back into dictatorship, it will be their dictatorship. If they choose civil war, it will be their civil war. And if by some happy miracle they choose democracy, it will be their democracy. In United States President George W. Bush's universe, faithfulness to delusion is "consistency." It reached its apogee at the Republican National Convention, where the President presented a picture of the war in Iraq from which all current facts--the street fighting, the bombing, the kidnappings, the torture, the departing allies--had been removed.