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24 Sep 2009 12:50 pm

What Withdrawing May Mean

D.B. Grady wants those who oppose the war to keep their eyes wide open:

[T]he 58% of Americans opposed to the war, opposed to a continued U.S. presence there, should have a clear-eyed view of what that means. It means condemning thousands to death, and hundreds of thousands to worse. When the Taliban returns to Kandahar and women are properly, in their view, denied any and all access to medical care and education, it should not be a surprise. It should not be a shocking revelation when homosexuals are stoned to death for the crime of existing. It's not an insidious Taliban secret to be later revealed; it is their modus operandi. The United States will not have caused it, but it will have been a party to it. We will have known something terrible was about to happen, and we will have let it. That's a lesson we learned in Vietnam, too.

That is why this decision is so excruciating.

But one should also recall that even today in Iraq, after billions have been spent and many lives lost, the assault on gay people has intensified. There is an attempted liquidation of the gay population in US-occupied Iraq right now. And yet I have yet to see any real concern expressed by Washington, or the rest of the world. Imagine if Iraq's Jews were being rounded up, tortured and murdered on the streets by death squads allied with the ruling Shiite powers. Do you think there would be silence? Or just a small story in the Guardian?

The Islamist world is a brutal, backward, bigoted miasma. The idea that we can change this with troops, or that its continuation is somehow America's responsibility, is, tragically, misguided.

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