Sand RantFour decades ago, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave a sermon speaking out against the war in Vietnam. He said, “There comes a time in all of our lives where silence is a betrayal.” Let the silence stop.

Nobody in this great nation would have liked to have seen Iraq become the beacon of an emerging and successful democracy then I. If we would have been successful, it well could have slowly changed for the better the most dangerous region in the world. Sadly, success, like any new venture is always in the details.

I’d love to go off on the Bush administration’s manipulation of questionable intelligence and outright lies to clear the path and justification for our invasion of Iraq. I suspect it will become a valuable and costly history lesson in how democracy was tragically hijacked when the checks and balances required in the Constitution were thrown out the window for profit and political expediency, that’s for another day.

“The devil is in the details” and the management of details is why the Iraqi experiment is an abject failure. Our biggest mistake; was not clearly understanding the centuries of strife between the Sunni, Shia, and Kurds in Iraq. The two largest factions, the Sunni and Shia have been warring over who is the true Mohammed, and have had an on again off again civil war, and an Iraqi invasion or the subsequent implementation of democracy was never going to “fix” that. Then there’s democracy, our brand of democracy. If you factor in the nuances and beliefs of the Muslim faith, our brand of democracy will never work. Why. our democracy is based opn equality. As one of many examples, when a women is required to wear a bee keeper suit in public, not chose her own husband or hold a job as part of their faith, our American brand of democracy is the square peg in a round hole. If the Iraqi’s want democracy, they’ll have to fashion it around their faith and culture just like we as American’s have done through many years of civil strife (the Civil War, Women’s Suffrage, civil rights legislation…etc). Can Iraqi’s have a democracy, only if they want it, not us.

We were not greeted as liberators, we are occupiers. Yes, the big bad bogie man is gone and with Saddam’s fall came a fierce battle for dominance by the above groups. How Bush and his advisors could possibly miss that throwing over Saddam wasn’t going to insight civil war may become one of the most sought after answers in our country’s history.

And where do our troops stand today? In the middle of no man’s land, targets of both the Sunni and Shia as they wage their battle for control of their country. And we are stuck there. Do we as the occupier side with the Sunni or with the Shia? Politically and for the stake of what is left of the stability in the region, we cannot take a side.  Factions within a country historically fight civil wars, unless the outside force is willing to take side, they just gets in the way.

Because of our ignorance or arrogance and our lack of planning and attention to the details we have lost this cause. There’s a great nursery rhyme that says clearly were we are today.

Reverend King was right, it’s time for us to break our silence of betrayal and demand what most of us who live in the real world know what is the enviable. Let’s come home.