Another Petition, this Time, Sadly, it Needs to be for Iraq
I have a petition going through MoveOn.org urging President Obama to not involve the US militarily in Iraq, but to pressure Nouri Maliki's government to enact political reforms to address the underlying Sunni grievances of disenfranchisement and marginalization. Amazing, over ten years later and we have seemed to have learned nothing.
If you want to have your voice heard, please contribute your name to this petition. Last I checked we had nearly 70,000 signatures.
For my conservative friends who don't want to sign something put out by MoveOn, I haven't seen anything from any conservative groups at this point urging against US military intervention in Iraq. If there is something out there, please direct me to it, or if you know of an organization willing to put out something on Iraq, please let me know, I'm happy to help them too. We don't need further loss of American lives in wars overseas nor do we need to continue our Nation's inept, and deadly, meddling abroad. Partisanship should not supersede such sense.
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Tell President Obama and Congress: Keep America Out Of Iraq! Petition by Matthew Hoh
To be delivered to The United States House of Representatives, The United States Senate, and President Barack Obama
President Obama and Congress, don't take new military action in Iraq. The solution to the chaos is not another American military intervention, including bombing strikes. President Obama was right to end the Iraq War in 2011, and it would be a tremendous mistake to restart it now. There are currently 69,917 signatures. NEW goal - We need 75,000 signatures! PETITION BACKGROUND Fallujah. Mosul. Baghdad.
Hearing these names again sends a chill down my spine. As a Marine who served in Iraq, I know well the bloody costs paid by Americans and by Iraqis in these and so many other cities over the past decade. I have friends who to this day remain on the front lines of a sectarian conflict that is tearing their homeland apart. And I am saddened to see the renewed and growing violence once again gripping Iraq.
But I also know that the solution to the chaos in Iraq is not another American military intervention. The president was right to end the Iraq War in 2011, and it would be a tremendous mistake to restart it now.
The United States and Iraq have already paid dearly for George W. Bush’s disastrous decision to launch the Iraq War. With Iraq once again descending into violence, we must not repeat the mistakes of the past. No military intervention, whether a massive invasion like the one in 2003 or the limited airstrikes some are calling for today, will solve the deep and complex challenges Iraq is facing. Iraq’s problems can only be solved by Iraqis, not American bombs. Launching another military intervention in Iraq would only throw more fuel on a fire that is raging. Even worse, it would once again risk American lives in a fight that is not ours and that we cannot win.
Over the past few days, the news has been filled with stories of a swift insurgent advance through northern Iraq. Sunni militants, under the banner of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), have taken over city after city in northern Iraq. These militants, fresh from the fight in neighboring Syria, have made dramatic progress, capturing American-made weapons and supplies left behind by the fleeing Iraqi security forces. Their advance is fueled in no small part by the repressive sectarian policies of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. The situation may get worse before it gets better, but one thing is clear: American bombs are not the solution.
Even more chilling than watching the violence in Iraq is listening to the pundits here at home. The very same men and women who lied to the American public and sent thousands of my fellow men and women in uniform to their deaths are now leading the charge for another military intervention. Many of these men should be in jail; none of them should be listened to.
If my friends in Iraq are to ever find peace, if their children and their grandchildren have any chance of growing up without the butchery of beheading knives and the carnage of car bombs, peace will come through negotiation and settlement, as it briefly did post-2007, and not through an American strategy of choosing sides, choosing winners and losers, and indulging in the self-satisfactory, self-indulgent, guilt-erasing, yet illusory, medication of bombing.