But we are not into nation building

Instead of going after the architects of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, George Bush, for his own reasons, diverted the military to the occupation of Iraq, for reasons that are still not clear. And even now, when the administration's lies about our motives and their complicity, are common knowledge, Bush and his various mouthpieces insist on equating the two.

Here's what I know: In the five years since our invasion of Iraq, the Iraqi people are not safe in their own homes, do not have reliable electricity or running water, and live lives of unimagined terror. The only people who seem to be doing well in Iraq are the independent contractors who question prisoners, cater Army meals, and manage every aspect of Iraqi life from the spotty electricity to the stock exchange. Tonight the President will appear on television to assure us that things are just dandy in Iraq and that troops will be coming home soon, maybe not tomorrow, but soon.

No doubt about it, the attacks on 9/11 should have been answered, but the Taleban could have been found in Afghanistan, Pakistan or Saudi Arabia, had we been interested in looking. We sure didn't care what the Taleban was doing when it usurped the Afghan government an instituted faith based policies that meant females could not be educated or hold jobs and that it was just fine to blow up those Buddhas.

I understand that we Americans do not like to think of ourselves as the aggressive bully boys who would invade a country that has done nothing to us--but that is exactly what happened. And it is not unpatriotic to question this or any other administration.

If we are not, as the administration maintains, dabbling in nation building, then why are we in Iraq? If the administration did not intend our presence to be permanent that why did he completely destroy Iraq's ability to govern itself? This week Abdul-Satter Abu Risha, the most prominent figure in a revolt of Sunni sheiks against al-Qaida in Iraq, was killed in an explosion near his home in Anbar province. Does it seem to you that Iraq is making slow but stead progress towards becoming a democratic nation?

Bush can send all the soldiers and marines he wants to Iraq and it will make little difference. It's like calling the cops when your neighbor beats his wife. He'll stop beating his wife while the cops are then--but resumes when the cops are gone. We, the United States of America, has created one hell of a mess in Iraq. Since the first Bush administration, we have taken a country that had a high literacy rate, free health care, and equal opportunities for woman and reduced it to the stone age. We have brought those people nothing but heartbreak and despair. The senate Democrats lack the will to end the war by doing what Nixon did in Vietnam--he declared it over and brought troops home. And I can hear you now, "But look and what happened in Vietnam after we left." What happened in Vietnam happened because we were there in the first place. What has happened and what will happen in Iraq happens because we are there. Armies of occupation are never welcomed and we are an army of occupation who came unbidden into a country that had done us no harm. There are Iraqi people who remember Iraqi before the sanctions, before the occupation. Maybe the only answer at this juncture is to allow Iraq to splinter into it's original shape, pre-British intervention, before Gertrude Bell stitched it together and called it a country.