Hope for Iraq
Stories like this one in the Christian Science Monitor provide a little more hope for the situation in Iraq. To me, stories of this sort also add an important bit of perspective to the situation and underline the fact that Iraq is not Vietnam, despite what some have suggested. The most fundamental difference is the simple fact that in Iraq, we’re not the bad guys. While I take nothing away from the U.S. servicemen who fought in Vietnam, we were the bad guys there. At worst, we targeted civilians, and we were poor at differentiating between enemy and friend at best. In Iraq, however, we try very hard to avoid killing civilians. Some are killed by accident, which is tragic, but it’s important to emphasize that these are accidents. When jihadists target civilians in a marketplace, on the other hand, that’s not an accident.
The increasing cooperation signals that this distinction is increasingly clear in the minds of some groups of Iraqis. It’s not surprising, as a comparison of our goals with those of the Iraqi people shows:
Our goals:
- Eliminate jihadists from Iraq.
- Stablize Iraq.
- Rebuild Iraq’s infrastructure.
- Get out of Iraq as soon as practicable.
Their goals:
- Eliminate from Iraq the people who keep killing innocent people in marketplaces.
- Stablize Iraq.
- Rebuild Iraq’s infrastructure.
- Get the United States out of Iraq, the sooner the better.
There’s no reason we shouldn’t be able to figure this one out. I must say, however, that it might be a good idea to stop kidnapping people’s wives and children– it won’t exactly help win hearts and minds.