By Matthew G. Bisanz

President Bush announced that we will still have troops in Iraq after he has left office in 2009. This is a continuation of a war we began in 2003 and part of the larger war on terror begun in 2001. The question I have for President Bush is: what will we do over these next three years? I supported and still support our invasion of Iraq. Saddam Hussein was a criminal who threatened Israel and had the potential to destabilize the Saudi oil fields. For 10 plus years, we kept troops in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait in order to protect their oil fields and enforce U.N. sanctions against Iraq. Clearly, with Saddam in power, the United States had to spend funds in order to contain him. Therefore, in my mind, the need to protect oil fields and as a side benefit, free the Iraqi people was justification enough to invade Iraq.

Here is where I diverge from President Bush. Where he saw our invasion of Iraq as a historic chance to establish a representative democracy in an otherwise un-democratic Arab world, I saw the invasion as a way to protect our economic interests and the interests of our allies Kuwait and Israel. In my mind, a representative democracy is not a necessary or even wise model to impose worldwide. Democracy presupposes that the people desire to participate in their government and possess a capacity to work within the confines of limited government. Iraq may not be ready for democracy. It has had absolute rule imposed on it for the last several centuries and never had a chance to develop the governmental institutions needed for a democracy. President Bush postulates America can teach Iraq how to become a democracy. However, even America was not a representative democracy at its birth. We went through a war for independence that resulted in many loyalists leaving the nation. This was followed by a decade long test of the Articles of Confederation before the final adoption of the Constitution

However, only white men who owned property and belonged to the right religions could still vote in state elections. Not until the 1840s were the final religious and property requirements abolished. If one can think of America as a piece of pottery, it was not fired in the kiln until the Civil War. This was followed by a century long cooling down period that preceded true civil rights for African-Americans. Full formation was not achieved until women received the right to vote with the 20th Amendment in 1919.

How can President Bush expect Iraq to change from a traditional Muslim society based on many institutions and procedures of the 14th century overnight? The United States took about 200 years to develop from a late 18th century starting point

Further, who is to say traditional theocratic institutions need to be replaced by secular governmental institutions? Many states today maintain official religions and many developing nations need a strong leader in order to focus development efforts. This Iraqi civil war everyone keeps talking about may be just the thing required to forge a single Iraqi state or split Iraq into more stable units such as Kurdistan, Shia’ Iraq, and Sunni Iraq. However, none of these things can happen if the United States stays in Iraq

If you ask me whether or not we should have invaded Iraq, I say yes. If you ask whether or not we should have stayed around to get Saddam, you get another yes. If you ask whether we should stay around and help them form a new nation, I say no.

Nations exist because of bonds between people. The forced bonds of an autocratic leader or the voluntary bonds of a democracy, they are required for a nation to exist. Those bonds are created internally and cannot be imposed by force. They take decades and centuries to develop and may not reflect the bonds that exist in other nations. Therefore, the United States should be on its way out of Iraq as its primary mission of preventing Iraq from being a threat to its neighbors has been accomplished and it is now up to the Iraqi people to begin the long process of forming a new nation.