by Elsewhere 11 Replies latest jw friends
What happened to the days when you could make a living farming your own land and have dinner with your family every night?
Gone with the days of 40 year (or less) average life expectancy, rampant disease and infant mortality, working from dawn till dusk just to eek out a meager living for a large malnourished family. Unless you happened to be rich, of course.
God bless the modern concept of 'middle class'.
rem
Sadam is not in power. Bush and Cheyney want to get their hands on some of that oil money under the assumption of "rebuilding" the country, when they're the ones that bombed it in the first place. We don't even know if schools or social security will be funded ten years from now and their priority is spending billions to change the form of government of a country in the middle east?
Long before the U.S. got involved in Iraq, Saddam Hussein was slaughtering his own people by the thousands. This should have been enough reason for us to invade Iraq and depose this despicable dictator. Unfortunately, the Bush administration was poorly advised on this issue, and our government concocted a cockamamy story about "weapons of mass destruction" in order to invade Iraq. It was a miserable public relations move. Instead of the rest of the world looking upon the U.S. as a liberating hero, we are now looked upon with incredulity and skepticism.
We had every opportunity to end the harsh Saddam regime during the first Gulf war, but we opted not to. This was a terrible mistake.
The price we will pay is diminished education for our students, and diminshed care for our own elderly. The money to fund the rebuilding of Iraq has to come from somewhere. That "somewhere" will be the pockets of the taxpayers. This will hit the middle class hardest, as they are the ones who pay the most. The rich are the only Americans that will benefit from the rebuilding of Iraq. Corporations like our vice president's Halliburton are set to make billions of dollars in profits.
Do I think we should pull out of Iraq? Absolutely not! You do not necessarily pull the knife out of someone who has been stabbed -- you may complicate the damage. What we do need to do, however, is to allow a more international presence in Iraq. We've already bungled our public relations worldwide, and staying there at the expense of Mr. and Mrs. American taxpayer is not going to repair that damage. We need to admit our mistake, and ask the international community for assistance! Until the current administration learns to apologize for its mistakes and ask for assistance, instead of covering them up with political blather, we will not be trusted, and our status of "superpower hero" will continue to erode, both at home, and around the world.
