Five years later, it's time to really think

It occurred to me the other day that I don’t know much about Iraq.

It’s not that I don’t pay attention to the news, but for some reason I have let five years of articles and reports about the whole situation just streak through my head.

Sadly, I am not alone in this. Ask the average American what part of Iraq the key Anbar province lies in, or what the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite is and you will mostly just get blank stares.

Americans say they care what happens there, but this hasn’t translated into an awful lot of academic conversation over the situation.  We have instead taken to passing the blame and not thinking about it. That is one of many disheartening things about the conflict.  For all the information available about it, most of us know hardly anything about the country or the people there.

We are holding Iraq’s future in our hands, but the people running the occupation are only in the last year really beginning to understand it. On the home front we have clutched on to a blissful stupidity. It has become easier for us to blame Bush for the war than it is to take responsibility for the knowledge that “we, the people” should probably have.

We are a busy nation – we have kids to feed, reports to write, bills to pay, lawns to mow and hundreds of other excuses why we don’t have the time to think about Iraq – but the conflict is our fault. We wanted this war; on March 24, 2003, 72 percent of participants in a Gallup poll supported it.  A recent poll by Gallup shows 59 percent of those polled now say the war was a mistake.

The America I remember in March of 2003 was a hornets’ nest just hit with a bat. We were out for a fight, and we got it. I remember people thinking we could roll right through, that we were justified and that we were absolutely doing the right thing. I was one of them. But why didn’t we care if Bush or the intelligence community was lying then? And why haven’t we owned up to our own endorsement of the war before it made the going harder on the home front?

If the press was against the war, they didn’t do much about it. If all the people that now say they were always against the war really were, why didn’t they say more? Following a common trend in our national history, America got wrapped up in a jingoistic fervor that blinded us to what we were getting into. Explosions and tanks, guns and dust storms clouded our vision of the reality of war. 

If you want to see the things that CNN and FOX’s flashy imbedded reporters didn’t show you, go to the library and look for the book “Baghdad, truth lies within.” Its call number is 779.99567 S8442b, and its located on the 4th level in the photography section. You will see in that book a war that isn’t sexy, isn’t clean, and isn’t nice.

By following the trend, by not asking harder questions, by letting ourselves get taken, we allowed ourselves to get into this mess. Sadly, I don’t think we have learned that much from it. Even if we have, what happens when, in 30 years, a president wants to get into another conflict? Will we allow ourselves to be duped again? 
I think we will. 

Shortsightedness and superficiality have ruled our international policy for far too long. If we don’t change our way of thinking about the world and our relationships with these countries, we will keep electing more nincompoops who will make the same old mistakes.

So what do we do about it? You can try my plan for myself: everyday divert five minutes from checking out your friend’s newest application on Facebook and look up something about Iraq or Afghanistan or any of the other nations we are trying to mold right now. Now during those five minutes: concentrate. No texting or talking or listening to music or thinking about anything else: just read or watch and THINK!