Getting our troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan

USA should stop the war in Iraq and must immediately pull out its troops, leaving Iraq with increased U.N role in the reconstruction and election of a democratic government.

By any moral or economic accounting, we now are worsening the lives of Iraqi since the fall of Saddam. We have turned innocent young Americans into torturers in places like Abu Ghraib. When going into battle, we close hospitals first. We make sure that television and newspapers are not "able to show pictures of bleeding women and children being taken into hospital wards" ­ this reported on Veterans Day in the Times (Hersh 90). Not even our friends like us anymore, whether we are tourists in Europe or diplomats at the United Nations.

We must remember that the war-makers are feverishly trying to manipulate the perceptions of restive Americans. They fear the multitudes. That is why reporters were embedded at the beginning. That is why the toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue on April 9, 2003 was "stage-managed" by the U.S. Army, according to the L.A. Times (Clark 112).

Even the most recent battle of Fallujah was about "the American military intend[ing] to fight its own information war," as the New York Times observed. According to another Times article, the Fallujah hospital was shut down on the first day of the operation because our Army considered it a "source of rumors about heavy casualties." A senior military official called the hospital "a center of propaganda" as scores of patients were being treated (Hersh 155).

To argue the invasion and occupation of Iraq is pro-life and pro-moral values is too much of a stretch for thinking Americans, especially conservative Christians.

One cannot know the true intention of the war promoters, but the policy and its disastrous results require our attention and criticism. Pre-emptive war, especially when based on erroneous assumptions, cannot be ignored - nor can we ignore the cost in life and limb, the financial costs, and the lost liberties.

Being more attuned to our Constitution and having a different understanding of morality would go a long way toward preventing unnecessary and dangerous wars (Alterman 34). I'd like to make a few points about this different understanding:

First: The United States should never go to war without an express Declaration by Congress. If we had followed this crucial but long-forgotten rule the lives lost in Korea, Vietnam, the ...