Recently, 31 soldiers who were doing their duty in Iraq were killed by the Taliban as they were on the way to a night raid. Naturally this has sparked much sympathy for the families of these soldiers. I also give my sympathy to the families who lost so much. However, I have noticed a lot of status updates on facebook talking about how peoples hopes and prayers are with our soldiers in Iraq, yet nobody seems to be talking about ending the war. While people seem to be crying rivers for the Americans over there, nobody seems to give much of a shit about the civilians of Iraq. People who don't want anything to do with the conflict. People just trying to live their lives. In the most conservative of figures, there have been over 102,000 Iraqi civilians killed due to the violence. The amount of these that were victims of the Taliban or Al Qaeda versus the American military is not known. However, it is many more than zero. Yet nobody in Spokane fucking cares. We have been in Iraq for about ten years, and all we have been able to do is kill some bad guys, kill some good guys, waste a staggering amount of money, and further destabilize a region that was already about as stable as a ladder on a water bed.
I'm not saying we shouldn't have sympathy for soldiers as well. Quite the opposite. I'm saying it's 2011. Isn't the world a little old for this bullshit? Aren't people sick of losing loved ones? We got Saddam, we got bin Laden, isn't it time to end this war? We need to give the people of Iraq fewer reasons to hate the west. The way to do that isn't to bully civilians and bomb the fucking place. Because we are the ones who destabilized it, we have a responsibility to fix it. Unless the people of Iraq choose not to accept our help. They do not want us there, so fuck it. It's time to mend fences, not blow up the neighbors.
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