Everybody on DU should carry this with them: Whether to Achieve Victory in Iraq or "Surrender"

[sinkingfeeling]

http://www.truthout.org/article/victory-iraq-or-surrender

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Even were such optimism regarding the surge warranted, however, what these pundits fail to realize, is that military success and improved strategy does not of itself afford a moral and legal basis for continuing the occupation. Understanding how and why we invaded Iraq is relevant not only to ensure the accuracy of the historical record but, more importantly, to decide whether to continue the occupation in the hope or achieving a yet to be defined "victory," or in the words of John McCain, to "surrender," accept defeat and withdraw.

Civilized nations and individuals accept, at least theoretically, that human beings have inalienable human rights - among them the right to life and to live in a nation that enjoys political sovereignty and territorial integrity (sometimes referred to as national rights). Such rights are the basis of "noncombatancy," and provide a natural immunity from, among other things, being injured and killed unjustifiably and having one's nation invaded and occupied without warrant. To kill an innocent person, a noncombatant, is murder, and "the (unprovoked and unjustified) invasion or attack by the armed forces of a State of the territory of another State, or any military occupation, however temporary, resulting from such invasion or attack" is aggression.

We believe as well that aggressed individuals and nations have a right of self- and national defense, i.e., to use violence, even deadly force/war, all things being equal, to assert these rights. Morally and legally, we justify such a response with an understanding that the aggressors, by virtue of their violation of the rights of their victims, have forfeited their own immunity and have become liable to be resisted - warred against - in justified self- and national defense.

Defeating the "insurgency" - those freedom fighters resisting aggression and foreign occupation - and propping up a de facto government at the cost of hundreds of thousands of innocent lives, is not humanitarian intervention. To continue the occupation of Iraq in order to seek victory, i.e., the triumph of the aggressors over the aggressed, indicates an indifference to, and disregard for, the principles of morality and the tenets of international law and numerous agreements and treaties - the very characteristics of a rogue nation that we point to when proposing sanctions and justifying military intervention. Finally, it is to defiantly force our will upon the Iraqi people betraying an arrogance and an hypocrisy that brings our nation neither honor nor prestige, but rather hatred and righteous indignation