New Iraq plan fuels discontent

January 29, 2007 —

A recent episode of Saturday Night Live opened with a spoof of President Bush asking for more troops for Iraq.

This monologue had Bush saying that 21,000 troops wouldn't be enough to help the war-torn nation, so he wanted to bump the number up to 75 million.

The skit said the troops would include all members of the armed forces, all uniformed personnel trained to use firearms, the "armed criminal element," and other Americans in uniform, such as postal and sanitation workers.

As I watched this monologue, all I could do was laugh. Now I don't stay fully up-to-date with the war, but I was under the impression that the United States was going to start phasing troops out of Iraq instead of sending more over.

Every time I log onto the MSN homepage and see that more troops or more people have died in the Middle East, I just shake my head in sadness.

All I can do is wonder if things would be different had we not gone to war or if we had not stayed over there for so long.

Every time I see a flag lowered, I feel a pang of sadness for another life lost in the Middle East.

I believe the elections in November showed Americans are ready to get out of Iraq. The Democratic Party now controls Congress, after a decade of Republican control.

The congressional shift alone suggests that Americans are ready for major changes in the government.

A couple days before the airing of SNL, I saw John Kerry on one of the news channels criticizing Bush's plan. Now, I was in a noisy mall so I couldn't hear the television, but the blurbs that popped up while Kerry was talking said that Bush's strategy had no plans for action after the additional troops arrive in Iraq.

That "revelation" only fueled my current lack of confidence in the current White House administration.

President Bush reinforced his faith in his plan during the State of the Union address to Congress.

In his address, he asked that his strategy be "given a chance to work" and that we support our troops that are in Iraq or on their way.

I do not have a problem with supporting our troops because they chose to join the military to defend our nation - something that I'm not sure I would be able to do. I do have a problem with his request to give the plan a chance to work, though.

In an MSNBC.com article concerning the State of the Union address, Senator Jim Webb of Virginia was quoted, making a valid point: "The president took us into this war recklessly. We are now, as a nation, held hostage to the predictable - and predicted - disarray that has followed," said the Democratic senator.

In the same article, Webb made the statement, "The majority of the nation no longer supports the way this war is being fought; nor does the majority of our military."

Webb's statements completely sum up how I feel about the war in Iraq.

Saddam Hussein is dead. To me, it seems like catching him and punishing him for his crimes was one of the main objectives of the war in Iraq, another one being catching and punishing Osama bin Laden.

Shouldn't we actually try leaving Iraq instead of sending more troops over there?