We Are Not at War

Let's call our military presence in Iraq what it is: an illegal occupation of a foreign country.

We had no beef with the Iraqi people, even if 9/11 went down the way the Bush administration tells it (it didn't). We had no beef with Saddam either, except that he was about to trade his oil in a currency other than the US Dollar. Yet we have been killing, displacing and poisoning the Iraqi people since March 2003.

If there is a real terrorist hiding among the Iraqi freedom fighters, he's there only because we are there. He wasn't there before we invaded Iraq. He'll probably be driven out by the Iraqis themselves when we leave. And what gives us the right to usurp Iraq's land and call it the "major front in the War on Terror" anyway? How would we like it if another country invaded the US so that their enemies would come here to fight them? And in the process destroy our infrastructure, ruin our economy, kill our civilians, and drive millions of us out of our own country?

Let's stop calling this a war. Call it what it is: an excuse to try out high-tech weaponry, an excuse to give a trillion dollars to the military-industrial complex, an extremely bloody show wherein the U.S. gets extend its hegemony to the oil-rich sands of the Middle East.