What are we fighting for again?

Though unfortunately expected, the number still came as a shock while listening to the news on the radio.

Five years after the war in Iraq began, a grim milestone had been reached: 4,000 U.S. military service members. Dead.

Shock and awe? Indeed.

We were told the people of Iraq would greet us as liberators. We were told that Iraq oil money would pay for the war. We were told that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

Tragic are the consequences when the leaders in whom we entrust miscalculate on such a large scale.

While the escalation of American troop levels (a.k.a. “the surge”) has quelled some of the sectarian battles between the Sunni and Shiite Muslims, other factors that also have contributed to the relative dropoff in violence are showing signs of disintegrating.

The Sunni-affiliated Awakening Group - which numbers approximately 80,000 and recently has been working with the U.S. military to root out adherents to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida - was alarmed last week when six of its members were killed by an alleged U.S. airstrike.

Meanwhile, Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, a driving force behind the Mahdi Army militia, has given indications that a fragile cease-fire agreed to last year is not going to hold.

Let's not forget the Kurds, the largest nation of people without an official state, who control the northern areas of Iraq and have threatened to break away to form their own autonomous country.

Stuck in the middle of this mess are the members of our armed forces, who have been forced to conduct longer tours of duty with shorter periods of rest. At a meeting earlier this week, the military's Joint Chiefs of Staff informed President George W. Bush that keeping more than 150,000 troops in Iraq soon will stretch the military too thin.

The president, eager to run out the clock and leave someone else to take the blame when we eventually extricate ourselves from this morass, now insists that we must keep our sons and daughters in harm's way to preserve Iraq's nascent democracy.

Hmm, is this the same democracy that tacitly endorses strict Islamic (sharia) law to subjugate women?

Of all the disturbing images coming from Iraq in the previous five years - from the Abu Ghraib prison to the mass graves to the burned corpses of American contractors - there's one I can't shake from my mind.

Her name was Du'a Khalil Aswad, a 17-year-old Kurd who lived near the northern Iraqi city of Mosul. Aswad belonged to a religious sect known as Yazidi and became romantically involved with a teenage boy, a Sunni Muslim.

To punish her for this affront to her religion, a crowd of more than 1,000 men dragged Aswad into the street, stoned her to death then buried her with the remains of a dog. The execution - which was regarded as an “honor killing” - was captured in horrifyingly graphic detail by a participant with a cell phone.

Tell me again what we are fighting for?

A week ago, Congressman Patrick McHenry, a Republican, made a bi-partisan trip to Iraq to assess the situation. As expected, McHenry said the surge is working and that he got the sense that the Iraqi people want to preserve their country.

Wow, if things are improving so much, when can Americans skip Myrtle Beach and book a vacation to Baghdad? I hear the Tigris River is great for tubing this time of year.

Of course, during McHenry's visit seven U.S. service members were killed and mortar rockets were fired in the supposedly safe Green Zone, the walled city within a city in Baghdad that houses the U.S. operation.

Pulling out our troops now certainly would result in disaster for the Iraqi people, who already have suffered anywhere from 82,000 to 150,000 deaths from this conflict by several estimates.

At the same time, the Iraqi leadership needs to be told that the U.S. occupation does have an expiration date, particularly if it is unwilling to stand on its own.

Otherwise, the U.S. will continue to bury too many of its own, not to mention the thousands who already have returned without limbs or with severe psychological problems.

Our men and women of the military deserve better than to be placed in this quagmire with no definitive endgame for victory.

Paul Teague is a Lenoir-Rhyne College graduate with a political science degree and the News-Topic's Local News Editor.

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