Your family's $1200 went to invade and occupy Iraq.

Yes, the money we've spent so far on Iraq is $300 per man, woman, and child, so for a two-parent, two child family, that's what's been spent per year. THUS FAR. This doesn't even count the sacrifices of those who made the ultimate sacrifice - before April 2003, a body a day coming back is the quantification on that one. However, the count has been consistently 2.315 a day since we overstayed our welcome and the fighting intensified. This is true whether you look at 2004 or 2005. Thus, the insurgent count doubled after April 2004 and we started losing more men, but it has stabilized rather than increasing exponentially. Although we are now up to well over 2200 dead, 16,000 wounded, and 50,000 with severe mental problems, we can probably go home now since about half the insurgents joined not to overthrow the provisional government (much less the current elected one) but to get Americans out of Iraq. Thus, now that we've won back in May 1, 2003 ("Mission Accomplished") our continued presence is the greatest recruiting tool Al Qaeda currently has. Even weirder, Al Qaeda didn't even exist in Iraq until we invaded, and now it's a major problem. Even the Shi'a government is telling us that it would be easier for them to vanquish the insurgents if US troops would leave. Not only does our presence double the number of insurgents, but we're actually holding the Shi'a controlled government back which would ruthlessly crush the Baath Saddam loyalists if we weren't holding back the government. Thus, Cong. Murtha is correct, though for perhaps more pessimistic reasons than mine. We really CAN "declare victory and leave" in good conscience, and are actually making things worse if we stay.

Sadly, the real reason we got into this war is not likely the so-called WMD (Weapons of Mass Destruction), since we've found none of significance. What is perhaps more significant is the timing of when the WMD announcement occurred. Some of you who follow stocks (and also some of you who were unemployed during the last four years) will recall that when WorldCom announced bankruptcy, the Dow went below 10K in June of 2002 and didn't come back above it for over a year. The Republicans looked like they would lose the House to the Democrats for the first time since 1994, and this would not have been good for Bush. Arguably, his lack of an effective policy (at least at that time) concerning the corporate corruption scandals (which were clearly the major reason for the decline in stocks and the increase in unemployment) was going to earn him and the Republicans an F in the mid-term November 2002 elections. However, by invoking the threat of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, he was able to develop an issue which distracted the voters from the economy and led them to 'rally around their flag and their President' rather as 9/11 galvanized support for the 'leadership' (?) qualities of folks such as Bush, NYC Mayor Giuliani, etc. One can argue all sorts of reasons why perhaps we 'should' have invaded Iraq, but many of those arguments would have argued for invading Iraq almost as the first order of business in January of 2001, or as soon after 9/11 as possible. Why wait until just before November 2002? Unless....

Hopefully the elections in Iraq have been as good for all Iraqis as the mid-term elections were for the Bush Republicans (you may recall that James Carville had a paper bag over his head on the night of the election). However, 60% of Iraq is Shi'a Moslem, the predominant religion of the folks in Iran who followed the Ayatollah Khomeini and still rule Persians theocratically. Imagine a democratically elected Arab Ayatollah - 200 miles from Israel. That's IF civil war doesn't break out, or if the Iraqi Communist Party (Iraq's oldest and best organized party) doesn't simply seize power. While all these were reasonable possibilities from first principles before we invaded (begging the question, why then did we invade if a democratically elected Iraqi Ayatollah was the endgame), as it's turned out, while the Shi'a list did get elected, it appears, almost miraculously, that civil war won't occur, the Kurds will thus not secede, the Turks won't therefore invade, etc. Still, with a democratically elected Shi'a government, the same sorts of folks who rule Iran, now under Mahmoud "wipe Israel off the map or move it to Alaska" Ahmadinejad, does this make Israel more secure? For that matter, have we made 'friends' in the Moslem world this way, bombing innocent civilians, or new enemies? For example, we've all noticed the increase in the price of gas. This is due to the intensified fighting and terrorism throughout the Mid-East (especially against oil facilities) after we'd been there a year. However, it is less well-known that hundreds of Moslem rebels in Thailand took to the streets during that time period. Thus, are we really diminishing terrorism, as we arguably did by invading Afghanistan, or increasing it in places where it has rarely if ever occurred? My opponent at the Dallas County Republican Christmas party claimed, "if we don't fight the terrorists over there, we'll fight them over here." While this would have been excellent advice on Afghanistan, it was idiotic advice concerning Iraq. Indeed, we've seen Madrid bombed in 2004 by terrorists and London bombed twice in the summer of 2005, all due to our presence in Iraq. Zawahiri has even claimed that they'll get us next. Thus, are we fighting a war on terrorism or creating terrorism?

More generally, and sadly, there were basic reasons to expect democracy to fail in Iraq, yet we fought the war anyway. We've seen successful elections - thus far. However, whether we stay another hundred years or leave tomorrow, there are all sorts of reasons it could end as "one man one vote ONE TIME" or, more 'optimistically' it could be that democracy will re-elect a Shi'a theocracy over and over again, where the rights of women and non-Shi'a folks will be forfeit. The first reason the neos should have expected democracy in Iraq to fail is that Iraq is a figment of British imagination post-WWI. After the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the British took three separate 'vilayets' (regions that the Turkish-ruled Ottoman Empire had established) and welded them together as a separate administrative region. Thus, the Mosul Vilayet (which contained today's Kurds), the Baghdad Vilayet (the Sunni Moslems) and the Mesopotamian Vilayet (today's Shi'a Moslems in the south) were welded together. British administration only lasted two decades until the end of WWII, at which point the British started spinning off colonies as independent nations. There can be numerous reasons why democracies succeed. Usually, a nation has to fight for its freedom. However, association with a former colonial power that was a democracy helps as well. In the case of India, the British were there for many centuries. It may also help if there has been significant trade relations with a democratic power, such as between Japan and the US. One can come up with all sorts of potential necessary and sufficient conditions which might help a democracy, but it doesn't appear that many of those factors exist for Iraq. Even in Afghanistan, which needed invading, you have the history of the resistance of the Mujahedeen against the Soviets. They fought to regain their freedom, and this may at least offer some help in overcoming ethnic disputes within that nation and forging a democracy. Indeed, Afghanistan moved towards democracy briefly in the mid-to-late-1970s until the USSR invaded. There has been NONE of that process with Iraq. Thus, it is likely that IF a democratic election does occur, it will be one man, one vote, ONE TIME. As we've seen, perhaps the democracy will be stable and the three major groups (Kurds, Sunnis, and Shi'as) will still hang together as a nation, but with its women as an oppressed class relative to their status under Saddam Hussein, and with Christians, Bahais, and Jews making a quick exit or seeing their rights further extinguished. Was fighting a war so that Muslim men in Iraq could be better fed while they beat up their wives and murder each other's daughters in honor killings worth one drop of American blood or one cent of taxpayer money or the draining of our wallets through higher energy prices? I don't think so.

Ironically, the Kurds were formerly semi-autonomous for 12 years BEFORE we invaded due to the no-fly zone from Desert Storm. Thus, only Bush and allies of his in Congress could take a nation where a stable solution for its most oppressed minority had already been found and then risk blowing it for them. This is because if there IS a civil war and the Kurds declare independence from Iraq, they may get invaded by our fair-weather ally, the Turks. Yet my opponent still supports the invasion of Iraq and wants us to stay, even though it may result in fewer human rights for the folks Saddam had spent the most effort harming. Finally, for those who actually approved of a 'blood for oil' policy - DID IT WORK? It looks like we DID trade blood for oil, but not to make oil LESS expensive, but MORE - 100 PERCENT MORE! Big surprise, since Bush and Cheney are on the right side of that deal economically, as are the Saudis and Texas oil billionaires and Conartista Rice, who once referred to the President as 'her husband' and who is on the board of Chevron and has an oil tanker named after her.

It is the war-induced spike in oil prices which also explains the Libya dividend which Bush and pro-war fanatics are claiming. We'll recall that there were some immediately possible, but ultimately evanescent, dividends from our capture of Baghdad. During our successful taking of Baghdad, interesting noises were heard from Iran, North Korea, and Israel. Former leader Rafsanjani claimed that perhaps Iran could start looking into recognizing the US diplomatically. The actual government of North Korea started saying that instead of bilateral talks between the US and North Korea, perhaps South Korea, Japan, Russia and Red China should be involved as well. Ariel Sharon rarely gives interviews, but he gave an interview suddenly which claimed that Israel was going to have to eventually pull out of the settlements, etc. One could almost imagine that the US had thrown around its weight, and powers which had been intransigent started becoming more flexible. But where was Libya? Well, nowhere. Most of the discussions between us and the Libyans about burying the hatchet and resuming trade, etc., had begun as early as 1999. Instead, it is most likely the rising oil prices (increased by the increasing terrorism and intensification of the war) which gave Libya (as well as US politicians!!) huge incentives to trade in Libyan oil.

Given the 'real' reason we invaded Iraq, and the peculiarly political election timing, I was astounded that so many Democrats voted for the Iraq war - John Kerry, John Edwards, Hilary Clinton, and so forth. I seem to recall that before Bush took power, my opponent Sam Johnson voted AGAINST wars that Clinton propsed in places like Bosnia, Kosova, etc. Why is a war proposed by Bush any different? Is it because it is a Republican war? But please remember that it was Eisenhower who got us out of Korea, Truman who got us in. It was Nixon who got us out of Vietnam, and Kennedy and Johnson who got us in. So why should the Republican Party do a switch and become the party of war and Wilsonian idealism when it was formerly the party of peace and isolationist realism? Help me return my party to sanity by voting out the most vociferous proponent of our continued stay in Iraq.