Email of the Day

A reader writes:

I just read your post comparing the tragedy at VT and the daily terror in the lives of ordinary Iraqis. This kind of observation seems to summarize a lot of my anxiety over the future of our involvement in Iraq.  Along with many Americans I wish that we could extracate ourselves from Iraq and get our men out of the way of an inevitable civil war. At the same time I hear the words of men like John McCain and am forced to remember that the cost of leaving Iraq would be an increase in the chaos within Iraq. I also know that our absence from Iraq wouldn't remove our responsibility for the violence that we helped seed in 2003.

What if a Shia vs. Sunni civil war were to progress unchecked in our absence were to progress into genocide? One of America's great sins is its blind eye to the kind of terror that is occuring in Darfur today. Thoughts like these often lead me to think that the only morally right move in Iraq is to commit ourselves totally to the future peace of that nation. I want so much to wash my hands of Bush's war, but in a democracy all the people must take responsibility for the actions of our government. It is our responsibility to restore the peace that we stole from the children of Iraq, even if it costs us even more than it already has.

(Photo: An Iraqi girl gets embarrassed after offering flowers to a US female soldier from Alpha Company, 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry Regiment during a joint house-by-house search operation between Iraqi and US forces, in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, 16 April 2007. Insurgent gunmen attacked an Iraqi army checkpoint and killed 13 soldiers on a road in northern Iraq, in an area where Iraqi security forces often clash with Sunni insurgents linked to the Al-Qaeda network. By Mauricio Lima/AFP/Getty.)