mondayrocks

Who are we? What is America? What is America's role in the world? It seems to me that these questions have taken over the national agenda once again, and we can thank President George Bush for this. His war in Iraq has created a "crisis of confidence" in the American people, it has made those who love her deeply question her roots and it has made the entire rest of the world question her motives and the seeds of a very deep contempt have been planted.

These lands of ours are blood soaked. We killed over 600,000 of our own people during the civil war. We executed alleged communists during the cold war. We killed hundreds of thousands of Native Americans in our quest for manifest destiny. We threatened to wage nuclear war on the Soviet Union for over fifty years. We may be a city upon a hill as John Winthrop eloquently put it, but the path to that city, to that moral high ground was a hard one to bear. It seems to me that we should never desert such a hard fought spot…

…but reports have came out of Iraq that over one million civilians have died in our crusade for freedom, democracy, and liberty. The path to our spot upon this hill was bloody and violent, but we are now trying to raise Iraq to a similar status, a status filled with hope, independence and emancipation. We have taken democracy, American style, and exported it to Iraq. We removed the stability that held Iraq in check, however immoral that stability was, and replaced it with our own perverted form. We have failed to keep anything remotely stable. Generals have said we have begun to see the start of an ethnic cleansing, and I can't help but wonder; are we to blame?

We took our oh so grand ideas and we used the blood of our friends, our family, our country, and the world to pay for those ideas. We took our ideas and we are killing others in their name. Instead of using democracy; instead of using our own freedom to export American democracy and American freedom, we took our guns and we killed their people. Period. I am curious, how is this not our fault? How is it not our fault that over one million people have been killed in our name? It is my impression that when you start a war and you kill people for that war, you ought to be held responsible.

America understands this. Those politicians who support this war not only have blood on their hands, but they spit in the face of the very democracy that they are trying to spread. The People of this country overwhelmingly oppose this war, and for whatever reason, our government needs to accept that. Politicians often try to push intensely, nearly unanimously, unpopular, items onto our agenda but they need to realize that our agenda is different from their agenda. When politicians are so eager to spread "American" ideas with our brave young soldiers, when politicians are itchin' for a fight, they need to realize that we are the ones who die. This is a political war. A political war fought by the poor of this country, by the black, by the young and by the disadvantaged. America's cruel inequalities are on display for the entire world to see.

What's more, some people tell us that we're in Iraq for security purposes and not for democracy. They say that we are fighting to ensure more Americans survive here, in Americaland. The offensiveness of this argument is so bitter that I feel diminutive even mentioning it. People who make this argument cannot even fall back on the inherent morality of democracy, for they have the unspoken idea that American civilian lives are worth more than American soldiers' lives or even the lives of Iraqi civilians. It's okay if 3,808 American soldiers and over one Iraqi million civilians die as long as it does not happen here.

For so long we have been telling ourselves that we are the police of the world, and quite frankly, much of the world once agreed with us. If we were the police of the world, if we had any moral high ground whatsoever, we would be able to stop the genocide in Darfur. If we had more credibility, we could deal with Iran and North Korea – both of which are being destroyed at the hands of our gruesome war. To put everything into perspective, America is no longer on the United Nations Human Rights Council because the world community, through democratic means, voted us off that council.

With all of these things being said, and all of the outrage that I have expounded upon – so what? So what if we're killing dozens of people a day? So what? The only moral position that America as a nation can take is to leave right now. Leave right now. De-fund it, de-authorize it, win the Presidential election – just keep trying. We have already paid a terrible cost, we've already tarnished our reputation and we've already murdered countless people. This is unacceptable and inaction is betrayal.