Choosing Sides

Tom Friedman quotes Tony Blair in his NYT column today:

"Whatever people's feelings or beliefs about the removal of Saddam Hussein and the wisdom of that, there surely is only one side to be on in what is now very clearly a battle between democracy and terror. On the one side you have people who desperately want to make the democratic process work, and want to have the same type of democratic freedoms other parts of the world enjoy, and on the other side people who are killing and intimidating and trying to destroy a better future for Iraq."

Friedman heartily agrees.

Me, I was not in favor of going to war when we did. I gave this administration the benefit of the doubt about WMD, I really did. I even gave them the benefit of the doubt about a possible Iraq-al Qaeda connection. I actually defended the administration to a friend once, saying we had no conclusive evidence that there WAS no connection, and the sober Colin Powell thought there was a really serious threat there. But I did not want to go to war.

It is not "siding with the terrorists" to point out that there are two groups of people involved that Mr. Blair does not mention: The first group is made up of people who are too busy being worried about getting blown up, rounded up, told to evacuate, told they are not allowed to evacuate, shot while trying to cross rivers, arrested in the middle of the night, beheaded, shot in the streets, starved, and just generally buffeted by a war they did not choose but that is being fought in their houses, streets, places of worship, and living rooms. The second group is the occupying army. To pretend the occupying army is acting simply as a neutral authority to help those Iraqis trying to establish the proverbial 'free and fair elections' is insulting: you don't have to believe that we went in there to make Dick Cheney's buddies rich and redeem the Bush family name from wimphood (as some might see it) to recognize that a country doesn't commit hundreds of thousands of troops somewhere if it does not have its own interest in the place. You can argue that the interest was an idealistic one -- spreading democracy and all that -- but that doesn't change the fact that the US, in Iraq, is not in it just for the Iraqis.

I agree that whatever went before, we do seem to be stuck in Iraq, although since no one really seems to believe we can win there, I'm not sure what the point of staying is. But this war has more than two sides. I look at it, and think about the great mass of people in the middle, who would most like the violence and disruption just to stop, and perhaps to sit down, quietly, for a meal with their loved ones, (think of this tomorrow and Saturday as you sit down to your holiday or non-holiday meal with YOUR loved ones...), and I think about which side I'm on, and it's clear: I'm on THEIR side.