Nature of War

Today many times wars will involve both ideology and political maneuvering. The current Iraqi War can be seen as this. As much as I believe religion has corrupted the Middle East and made it a threat to everyone, I'm hard pressed to support to the tactics used by the Bush administration.

When the war started in 2003, people like Bill Maher were against it but also conflicted. Maher said he was 60/40 against it. As a critic of Islam in the Middle East himself, he said he understood what the Bush administration was trying to do. Then he took that a step further by saying if the United States was going into war, he was going to hope they would win. Many on the left condemned the war from the beginning and refused to take sides. The action itself was too wrong to support.

Now the war is pretty much lost and Maher is as boistorous as anyone about how wrong the United States is for its everyday actions. Other leftists who supported the war originally are not as easy to take exception to what Bush has done. They continue to hope for some positives and remember what leaving Vietnam did to that country after the Vietnam War.

I'm mixed. There is little about the war that has been positive but it was necessary to deal with the problems. The actions of terrorism hasn't been just a simple reaction to our foreign policy. As their religion states, they believe they should take control of the world. Even if we kept our troops and interests out of their land, we'd still be the Great Satan and their target.

I believe in the ideological battle as one did against facism and communism. I'm just coming to terms that war may not have been the best offense.