Are you anti-war? If so, what should you do? There seems to be a lot of questioning as to the point of the “anti-war movement.” Personally, I’m not anti-war, I’m anti-Republican leadership. Not to be cliche but this was the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time. We should have stayed in Afghanistan with more troops and with the broad international support that we had after 9/11.

Once that country was stabilized, which would (and will) take years to do, we might have been able to mobilize the U.N. with nothing more than the truth to go after the worst human rights offenders. There are countries under far worse rule that Iraq was suffering under that nobody talks about. That’s not to take away from the bad things going on in Iraq, but if it’s a humanitarian nation-building effort we were after, Iraq definitely would not have topped the list.

That’s probably why nobody pretended that human rights had anything to do with the invasion at the time it occured and why we built up a case for war under false and misleading pretenses. The false pretenses were also the most likely reason why the international community at large refused to help us.

Of course, now that we’re there we have to stay there and get the job done. I’m in the group that believes we need to significantly increase the number of troops we have over there in order to stabilize the country. I’m also in the group that wants to protest this war as vocally as possible. Whether you want to believe it or not, those two viewpoints go hand-in-hand.

The reason why is that this administration has refused all accountability for it’s actions. It refuses to setup even the most basic metrics by which to measure success. It refuses to present any sort of breakdown for budget requests for the Iraq war. It privatizes the war. It doesn’t seek competitive bids for the privatization. It won’t investigate the billions that have gone missing. It makes mistakes at every turn. It refuses to acknowledge that it has ever made a single mistake.

The point of protesting is to get the Republication party out of control of the White House and Congress so that we can get new leadership in to try and fix the problems. New leadership can acknowledge that mistakes were made and move to correct them. New leadership can put more troops on the ground to better stabilize the country. New leadership could approach the world community with at least the possibility of getting help.

These guys screwed up. Support Iraq, democracy, accountability, and our troops by voting them out of office the next chance you get. Oh, annd light a candle at the next vigil.

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