Chickening Out

A fool only grows more foolish with the passage of time. The best proof is the anti-war activists' rant of bringing the troops home. An event they recently capitalized upon was the tumult in Liberia. The other is the casualty of the post-war period.

One TV commentator in CNN's Crossfire says, and I paraphrase: Keeping peace in Liberia is much easier than Iraq, so why is our government still refuses to pull out from Iraq and go to Africa?

That commentator, like others who agreed with her, are not giving any thought to the conquences. Saboteurs are destroying pipelines and energy supply. Al-Qaida, by many accounts, are combining forces with the remanants of Saddam's thugs. If United States leave Iraq, they won't. Leaving Iraq is leaving Iraqis to the mercy of Saddam Hussein plus Osama bin Laden. There is no wrose timing than this.

Everyone agrees that the reconstruction of Iraq is both moral and necenssary. But the critics say the they want to bail out because American public will not tolerate futher casualties. Two hundred combat causalties can hardly be described as "serious" in military terms. And the critics know it, too. That's why they are saying it. The absurdity does not stop there, though.

If you pluck the sentence clean of euphemism, it became an entirely new statement: "we do not support peace-keeping in Iraq because Americans are too weak." Not only there is no evidence to prove the inherent cowardice of the American people, but this also fails to provide any justification for their recommanded course of action, which is runing away. Essentially, they're saying, we are not shouldering the responsiblity because we are not responsible beings. This way, a closed-circuit logical statement is constructed.

But this will only remain a closed logical circuit if it is a game of words, a pure excerecize of logic. Unfortunately, real world has one last logical consquence to add for the sloppiness of such thinkers. That is a ruined Iraq and a completely discredited United States.

-Jon Chin