The Consequences of Withdrawal

There are many people advocating the complete withdrawal of American troops from Iraq. It sounds good at peace rallies, that shout "Bring Our Troops Home", but let's be realistic. You can't destroy an infrastructure and replace it with nothing. If we remember the lessons from history, and think about the collapse of the Soviet Union, we remember the bloodshed from removing absolute control over the Balkan States. Are we ready to see thousands of civilians die in a civil war in Iraq? Are we ready to face the violence of ethnic cleansing that will result from complete withdrawal? We are the cause of the chaos that now faces Iraq, we removed a brutal dictatorship that somehow held the different members of a society in an stranglehold that repressed human rights, but also kept the various ethnic groups from killing each other.

There is a huge fortune in oil that we are gambling with in Iraq, and if we lose, we risk losing the whole Persian Gulf, state by petrol state. What that means for the world economy, just do the math. Subtract cheap oil from the American economy, and you get not just recession, but severe depression, and once the American economy folds, the rest of the world will follow suit. Globalization has made us all dependent on each other, if we go down, everyone goes down.

The Kingdom Of Heaven runs on Love. The Kingdom of Earth runs on Oil. I would love nothing better than for our kids to come home, but we've gone and opened Pandora's Box, and to leave without some sort of security in place is insane, almost as insane as beginning the war itself. Check out Juan Cole, the expert, for a sane exit strategy.

We can't have another Sarajevo on our conscience. We can't just go and cause the collapse of whatever evil empire we see fit, and not replace it with something that works, whether it be democracy or dictatorship, our need for inexpensive oil cannot justify it, our Christian conscience cannot rationalize the ethnic cleansing of innocent people for an inexpensive road trip. Because we won't walk three blocks to the 7/11, people in Darfur and Nigeria die. Money is not the root of all evil.

But maybe oil is.

There is more to the story of oil and evil, and I wish I didn't have to tell it, but having had a glimpse of the truth, I can't sit by and say nothing. And as unpleasant as the story is, I'm sure you'd do the same.

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