Ryan ChartrandJust about every day, I’ll read in the newspaper or watch on the news about how horrible the Iraqi war has gone. Without fail, I’ll see pundits raving over how the insurgents are winning and we, the Americans, are not. I beg to differ, but would like to do so through the eyes of an insurgent. Let’s imagine the war where the insurgents hold our cards and we hold theirs.
Imagine the United States subject to Sharia law and completely occupied by Al-Qaeda. We’re able to take pot shots at a few of them, and we manage to murder dozens of our own every day in an attempt to stop the public from collaborating with the Al-Qaeda invaders. Over time, Americans seem to be turning to Sharia and want to move forward with their lives. We find that 65 percent of the population wants Al-Qaeda to leave, but hatred for the U.S. insurgent forces – the “Wolverines” – is at about 95 percent. The people hate the occupiers, but they loathe the Wolverines.
Imagine now, a year into the occupation of America, George Bush’s two daughters were killed in a firefight with the enemy, which had surrounded the sorority house where they were hiding. A year later, President Bush was pulled out of a septic tank in Crawford by the Fedayeen, put on trial and sentenced to hang, which he did on national television. Dick Cheney, captured in an early morning raid several years ago, has been an invaluable source of information to target the Wolverines, and Condoleezza Rice was murdered by a suicide bomber this last fall.
Everywhere you turn, Al-Qaeda forces run security patrols and checkpoints, training Americans to do this for themselves. Stopping this requires the killing of our own, which further alienates us from a public that already despises us.
Does that feel like winning to you? Me neither.
Scott Nordholm
Civil engineering senior