Iraq

I stumbled upon two Iraqi blogs recently. I think they're being kept by brothers, one of whom lives in Iraq and another, who seems to be living somewhere else in the middle east. Their mom is also keeping a blog, but it is in Arabic and my limited knowledge of Hebrew doesn't help me decipher it at all. Raed and Majid both seem like very intelligent individuals. They also seem like people I might be friends with. Majid's insights about the war and what is happening in his country are striking, especially since he's only 17.

Reading these blogs made me feel several ways. The overwhelming feeling I had was stregnthened conviction that the U.S. troops need to get out of Iraq as quickly as possible.
I also felt guilty that, while I think about the war quite a bit, it is not everpresent in my mind. I have only bloged about it once in a while. Raed and Majid are in the middle of war and they blog about it nearly every post. Another feeling I had while reading the blogs was sadness. Majid wrote about hearing tanks driving by his house in the middle of night and being terrified that he was about to be killed. He also wrote about a classmate who got up in the middle of an exam and asked why he was studying when he might be dead tomorrow. The fact is, the U.S. army, while they may not be trying to kill civilians, are killing and maiming far too many innocents. The country is too unstable and out of control for our army to be occupying it. We have provoked too much hatred to be successful leading the Iraqi people.

Majid wrote that the Iraqi people were going through an amazing time before the U.S. invasion, a renaissance of sorts, and they should have risen up against Saddam on their own. We can't know if and when the Iraqi people would have staged an uprising, but when you look at this war and realize it was not about WMD's and it wasn't about protecting the U.S. from terrorists and the only thing it could have been about was oil and Bush family revenge, it is even more depressing to realize that the one positive thing that could come of the war, a free Iraq without the Saddam dictatorship, is being shoved down the country's collective throat by people many of them view as bullies. We are not the knight on a white horse. Instead of peace and harmony, my country has brought instability to the country of Iraq and to the lives of its people. No wonder so many of them hate us.

It is so good to hear the voices of Iraqis without the filtering of the media. Iraqi blogs should be required reading for our foreign policy makers... (But not the president, he probably wouldn't read them since he doesn't even read the newspaper.)

Thanks Raed and Majid.