It’s been pretty interesting to watch the news in the Middle East lately, especially the goings on in Iraq. As a person who deployed to Iraq and was on the front lines of some very bloody and brutal fighting it’s equally frustrating to watch the country fall apart. I saw a lot of friends get killed fighting there, and I was injured myself fighting the same group of people who are now wreaking havoc. It brings up some conflicting thoughts about my experiences there, but the whole of being there at all.

Still today, after being home from Iraq for seven years, I still can’t make up my mind as to whether or not we ever should have even gone into Iraq in the first place. It’s very easy for someone to sit back and say that we should have never been there in the first place, and when I was sent to Iraq I don’t think I had given that topic much thought, I only knew that I was in the Army, and I was going to go wherever they sent me to. But when we got there it was pretty clear that something had to be done because it was total chaos. It didn’t really occur to me at that time that this burden maybe shouldn’t have been ours, but as it were, we were the ones who had to deal with it. But I don’t think you can fully judge the situation unless you have a thorough understanding of the situation that is there and how inserting ourselves into the middle of it affects everything.

The first questions I ask myself when thinking about the whole situation is, “What did we hope to happen there?” And more accurately, “What did we expect to happen there?” Their culture of religion and politics is so vastly different than our own that you can’t really truly understand unless you have lived in it. And I even include myself in that. I experienced fifteen months of it, but I still can’t imagine what it is like to live your life in that sort of society. I think politics here could most accurately be described as an ongoing gaggle of shenanigans. But here in America when our favorite candidate loses we grumble but we don’t have to worry that the winner is going to attempt to murder all of the people who don’t support him or her, whereas this is a legitimate concern in Iraq, and a few other countries in that area. There has been so much violence and deception and lying over the last two thousand years that there is now a hatred among some people that I just can’t even fathom. We are way far gone from the point where diplomacy and negotiations will have any effect, and a civil war is inevitable. But the coming civil war won’t be civil, it will be more of an extermination because the people causing the problems now don’t want to coexist with other groups, they want to kill them all and live in a place that is free of them. In the latest news they’ve even begun killing other Sunni Muslims who refuse to fall in line with their own radical thoughts.

So again, what did we expect to happen? We entered into a situation more complex than our own understanding. A situation that has been brewing hatred and mistrust for thousands of years, and recently made worse by a dictator who had no qualms about murdering his own people for any reason he could make up, and we thought that by showing our presence and killing a few of the bad guys that the country would suddenly whip back into shape and become a regional power. I knew when I left that if we were going to have to count on the Iraqi Soldiers and Police to pick up where we left off then Iraq was about to be in trouble once again. And when we declared Operation Iraqi Freedom over and ‘won’, that someone has a seriously flawed view of what victory means. When I was in Iraq I felt like we were making a difference in our part. We killed and captured a lot of very bad people, and the good people who lived there were genuinely appreciative of our efforts, and then we left and expected everything to be good to go. It kind of reminds me of a saying that I learned in the military: Proper prior planning prevents piss poor performance. Apparently these words were not taken into consideration by those that made the choice to send us to Iraq.