Iraq Again. Why the Veto should never have been stamped.

Before deciding to veto HR 1591, a spending bill which included a clause requiring a deadline for the removal of US troops from Iraq soil, the President of the United States should have taken an early morning drive down to Arlington National Cemetery, and spent a few hours touring the bone white headstones. He should have then walked down the Vietnam Wall, and read as many names on the wall as there are words in the Constitution.

I did not support the invasion into Iraq. I do not believe our actions since the invasion have been even remotely prudent. I believe our expectations for the region were at best idealogical, and at worst fanciful and adolescent. Saddam Hussein, as with all despots, needed very much to be ousted. However, the action taken to achieve that end should have been a massive and multilateral endeavor (having Micronesia on your side does not count). The powers which opposed the invasion, namely Russia and France, were primarily those who stood to lose greatly if Hussein were no longer in control of Iraqi oil fields. The powers which supported invasion were those who stood to gain nothing so long as Hussein remained in power, namely the US and Britain, because he refused to make oil trade agreements with any of them. Whoever controls Iraqi oil controls the price of oil. Iraq has a democratically elected government, and our mistake is to continue to expect statesmanship, to hope that the Iraqi people will reconsider their elected body in favor of our Federalist and Whig equivalents. Iraq is a nothing if not a Muslim nation, and its politics necessarily reflect that. We sit across the pond refusing to accept that we are not alchemists, and that we cannot turn the political steel of Iraq into democratic gold. Hell, we cannot even accomplish that for ourselves.