By Jason Cohen
Professor Carol Eisenberg asked the question last Wednesday on the minds of many Americans: Does the United States have an exit strategy from the war in Iraq? Her answer: The U.S. does not plan to leave.
Eisenberg said the United States entered Iraq because the administration claimed there were biological weapons and Saddam Hussein was connected to the terrorist group Al Qaeda. However, no weapons were discovered and Saddam was not found to be connected to them at all.
“Did Bush lie to us?” Eisenberg posed this question and said it was known that people in Bush’s cabinet such as Vice President Dick Chaney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, wanted a war with Iraq prior to 9/11. They wanted to go to war because they were afraid Sadam would become militarily strong again and believed if they got rid of him, the U.S. could establish a friendly regime in Iraq and gain control of the Persian Gulf.
Eisenberg compared countries to people.
“When they are weak they become desperate and desperate times call for desperate measures,” she said.
Inspectors were sent to Iraq to find weapons, they found none, but the U.S. went to war in order to make the people of America believe there were weapons there.
“Why are we still there?” Eisenberg asked the audience. She said the troops are instilling democracy to help the war on terrorism and most importantly to put power in Iraq, in which there will be leaders that will carry out American power.
“If the Iraqis wanted to do what we wanted them to do everything would be perfect,” she said.
The U.S. government wants to make Iraq a secular nation, share their views about the Middle East, become friendly with Israel and to only recruit leaders that the U.S. approves. While the Bush admnistration believes that if they stay in Iraq longer all of this will happen, they are actually causing more violence, danger and disunity, Eisenberg said.
“How could our goal be to democratize Iraq and let them live in peace if we bombed and destroyed the city of Faulljah,” she said.
Eisenberg said the U.S. needs to see what the Iraqis want; and most of them want Americans to leave. America has been controlling their freedom by creating the Transitional Administrational Law, which was Iraq’s interim constitution, she said. This put restraints on what Iraq could vote on and limited the ability of the Iraqi government to make effective decisions.
A third party is needed in order to help Iraq make its own decisions and stop the violence, but the U.S. cannot play that role, she said. The U.S. simply has too many goals.