Another Iraq war casualty: Our ability to help

Listening to Democrats talk about how we've got to "get out of the middle of a civil war" in Iraq has caused some strange feelings for me lately.

As much as I want for the U.S. to extricate itself from that sucking shithole of wasted lives and money, I thought that the willingness to get between people trying to slaughter one another was one of the better things about us liberals.

Modern Republicans prefer to provoke civilian deaths abroad (Nicaragua) or ignore them, (Darfur), depending on their corporation-biased opinion of what best serves American interests.

Democratic presidents, however, have a history of trying to stop those deaths, even if tardily (Bosnia) and ineffectually (Somalia), with the most glaring and shameful exception being our inaction during the Rwandan civil war. All things being equal, Democrats don't like to sit around and watch chaos spread and innocent people die.

Under normal circumstances, a tribal bloodbath between Sunnis and Shiites would be the sort of thing that we'd want to tamp down and defuse. Maybe we'd use some military force, as in Bosnia, maybe we'd try to help prod some diplomatic solutions, as in Northern Ireland. Undoubtedly, we would shovel money at both sides to make it worthwhile to simmer down--- and compared to the current fiscal assfucking our military action is giving us, it would be a bargain.

But these aren't normal circumstances. As worthy an objective it might be to keep the ethnic groups from eachother's throats, we're not the ones that can do it anymore.

We're too tainted. Tainted by the lies we rode into the country on. Tainted by the tortures and murders that we've committed there.

Even if we had the military and financial capacity to do it anymore, nobody in or out of the Iraq would believe in the worthiness of our goal, or try to help. Who can blame them?

After our claims to be in Iraq to find WMDs and establish democracy, turned out to be such utter bullshit, our professions of humanitarian intevention are now likely to be perceived as more of the same.

Consequently, our forces would remain their current position: Welcomed by none, and used and hated by all.

What a mess. Now that we've created a scenario which actually might justify a U.S. presence in Iraq, our direct responsibility for that scenario makes it impossible for us to do anything about it. We're fucked. Though not nearly as fucked as the poor Iraqis who live, work and die in our experiment to see what happens when extremely limited minds receive nearly unlimited power.

Intellectually, I know that the only option for us at this point is to pull out and abandon the Iraqis to a Lebanon-style civil war, and insulate ourselves from the jihadists that conflageration would create.

But fuck, I don't like it. It makes me feel guilty, and ashamed of what America has done, two emotions I wish I had GWB and Dick Cheney's natural immunity from.