Introduction:
President Obama annouced to the nation that the war in Iraq is finalling winding down. Our nation spend billions of dollars on Bus’sh Bogus war and dropped smart bombs on a dumb mission. Check out the pieces below
Imam Mahdi Bray
Quote of the Day: ” Bombs over Baghdad, children die, mothers cry, and I still ask why.”
There Is No “Victory” in the Iraq “Withdrawal.”
Imagine that you are the owner of a large home, and that many members of your extended family live there. Another family, hostile to you and not even in your neighborhood, falsely accuses you of plotting to attack them.
You try to speak with your antagonist, but to no avail; they are determined to seek revenge on your clan despite their lack of evidence of your hostile intent.
Then they break into your home, kill some of your relatives, steal your valued treasures, and evict you from the house, while they proceed to break your furniture, smash your kitchen, and slice up your bedroom mattress – all the while keeping you from returning to the home that is rightfully yours, along with some of your surviving relatives, who are in deep trauma, and who now begin to attack each other out of frustration over their circumstances.
Then, some seven years after they attacked you and evicted you from your home, the bullies vacate the house and leave you a check for $100 to “compensate” you for the damage.
This, in metaphor, is the U.S. experience in Iraq. And it is why we cannot go for the bogus and disingenuous claim that the withdrawal of “combat” U.S. military teams from that nation -while leaving some 50,000 American troops as “trainers” and “advisers” to the Iraqi military – is any kind of victory.
President Obama, in his campaign run for office, reminded us that he opposed the Iraq war. Now we need to remind him of the horror of the U.S. aggression that was based on deliberate deception and an agenda of resource control. Despicable though Saddam Hussein might have been, he was not a collaborator in the September 11th, 2001 terror attacks on America. Neither did Iraq possess any of those dreaded “Weapons of mass Destruction” touted by the CIA and the Pentagon as the “smoking gun” that triggered the 2003 American (re)-invasion of that nation.
And now, while civil war and sectarian violence rage in Iraq, while the nation has neither a national government nor a clear strategy for reconstruction, the United States has pulled combat forces from Iraq, including troops that will, without doubt, be redeployed to the senseless vortex of war in Afghanistan. And to add to the messy tragedy, it was reported this week by reliable news sources that America has apparently wasted five billion-billion-dollars in failed and incomplete development assistance projects in Iraq.
War is truly proverbial quicksand that is far easier to jump into that to get out of. The President is correct when he said that this nation has paid a high price for this military adventure, but the price has been far greater for the people of Iraq themselves. No doubt, the U.S. partial military withdrawal will be a relief for some in America, including families of thousands of dead and wounded soldiers. But as my own two humanitarian visits to Iraq confirmed, in 1998 and 2000, the country, after the first Gulf War, remains horribly wounded and scarred.
There is no “victory” in withdrawing from a war that never should have started in the first place. It is even arguable that the danger of extremism and fratricidal civil war in Iraq fed off the U.S. invasion itself.
War, anywhere and under any circumstances, is a brutal, messy, and inhumane enterprise. And the war in Iraq, in particular, is a war that should never have happened. The only possible, and partial, “victory” would come when America foots the bill for full Iraqi national reconstruction, pays reparations for the immense number of Iraqis killed and wounded by American forces since the 1991 economic sanctions and the 2003 re-invasion, and promises never to repeat this tragedy in Afghanistan, or Iran, or anywhere else in the Muslim-majority world.
Ibrahim Ramey





But the prophetic and powerful voice of Rabbi Arthur Waskow of the Shalom Center truly captured the sentiments of all the presenters when he spoke of the goodness and integrity of the Cordoba Initiative leaders, and then told a story of his own grandmother, who, some 60 years ago, rebuked another woman after that woman made racially insensitive remarks. “This is not what we say about other people, because this is America”, he recounted from his grandmother’s words.






