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Is Iraq worth the trouble?
By Al Ruechel | 06-24-04

This has nothing to do with Bush or Kerry or politics in general. It has to do with a gut feeling you hate to acknowledge. It has to do with wondering if the Iraqi people are worth the blood of our sons and daughters. Okay, I’ve said it! Don’t tell me that at sometime over the last several months you haven’t had the same doubts. I’ve heard it spoken in grocery stores and in shopping malls. I’ve heard it spoken by the old and young, both men and women. I don’t trust polls and I certainly won’t let Time or Newsweek or CNN dictate to me how I should feel. No, this is coming from my own head and heart. I fear there are many more like me who are having a hard time resolving what we know needs to be done and the reality of what is happening.

You saw the story! Young Iraqis were dancing on car tops just moments after a terrorist bomb blew up a number of vehicles and killed 13 people. Three American civilian contractors working to rebuild Iraq’s antiquated electrical power grid lost their lives. The Iraqis in the street looted their burned bodies and danced for joy shouting anti-American slogans.

We’ve seen so many beheadings we have almost become numb. Nick Berg, Paul Johnson and the young man from Korea. I suspect there will be many more. We beat ourselves up over some prisoner abuses by a few nutcases while they video themselves hacking off the head of a screaming American. The Geneva Conventions… what a joke! We try to play by the rules while the terrorist write their own.

You stupid, ignorant fools. My contempt and loathing is so great for the terrorists it is beyond measure. That’s my internal voice talking. You celebrate the deaths of the ones who are trying to help you. Did you bother looking at the faces of the thousands of other people who lost arms and legs? They are Iraqis, bone of your bone and blood of your blood. You celebrate the deaths of a few Westerners at the expense of hundreds of your own countrymen. You are so ignorant that you believe the best way to get rid of the U.S. is to cripple your own country. You remind me of when I was a missionary in Ethiopia. More than one-million people needlessly starved to death because they refused to leave their homeland, travel over a small mountain ridge, to a valley lush with vegetation and food. They told aid workers it was better for them and their children to die in their own birth land then to flourish in a land of another tribe. This wasn’t outside of Ethiopia. It was a short three miles over a ridge. The tribe they feared had never actually occupied that valley. It was a myth. Life was within their reach and instead they chose death. That is the epitome of ignorance of those who are actually hoping freedom fails in Iraq.

In just a matter of days, the US will complete the transfer of power and sovereignty back to the Iraqis. It has been a brutal war between the past and the present. We have attempted to salvage a religion and a people who have seen their culture destroyed by the zealots. My prayers and hopes are with the silent millions of Iraqis who have been manipulated and abused for so many years they may not understand any other kind of leadership than the kind delivered at the hands of an oppressor. Many more Iraqis and Westerners will be killed before freedom’s roots have a chance to grow. Every member of the transitional government knows they are marked men and women. They are marked because they represent something terrorists fear more than the wrath of Allah: choice, self-determination, and democracy. Freedom is the enemy of ignorance. But like the air itself, it is almost impossible to manage once the scared lungs of the oppressed take their first breath. It demands another and another until there is nothing else to satisfy the soul. It creates its own space. It assumes everyone is created equal by a God who likes a level playing field. That principle alone clashes with many of the clerics who claim some direct link with a Deity who demands that men avenge His enemies.

Which brings me back to my original point. Do Iraqis deserve freedom and democracy? Are they worthy of the sacrifices of our children? Are they intelligent enough to handle the responsibilities it takes to keep it alive? The outraged part of me says no. The selfish, disgusted, nuke-the-bastards redneck begs for my attention. The pessimist that fears the Iraqis will choose a leader as bad if not worse then the one we just dethroned is just a shadow away.

Then…the flag catches my eye. Somebody more than two hundred years ago thought enough of me to lay down their life in pursuit of these “self-evident” truths. They didn’t debate my intelligence or worthiness. Somebody over two thousand years ago thought enough of me to bare my ignorance and stupidity and my spiritual terrorism to a place I could not go but deserved to hang. God is the author of freedom. It does not bare a name or a nationality. It is a free gift we have been given the privilege to carry to those too weak and down trodden to see it’s glory. May we not fail in our resolve to do that which is right in God’s eyes!