War in Iraq

The war in Iraq raises many moral issues, however, possibly the biggest of these moral dilemmas is whether of not it is our duty as Americans to interfere with the lives of the Iraqi people in a misconstrued search for terror. Black Elk and Dostoyevsky, although very difficult to compare, both would have the same general outlook on the moral dimensions of this war.
The United States is no doubt a super power in the world and has a responsibility to help out other nations in need, we have the resources and manpower to make things happen and many of the worlds conflicts in the past have been solved by United States intervention. Although we have the ability to change the world, especially smaller third world countries, the question arises whether or not it is our duty to intervene with the lives of people halfway across the world because we believe that their way of life is not right. The Iraqi people have been in conflict for hundreds of thousands of years over religion, their lifestyle revolves around religion and defending those beliefs. This defense comes with violence and death and will most likely never be settled no matter how much the United States or any other country for that matter tries to mediate. The biggest moral issue in this conflict arises when the United States sends thousands of troops halfway across the world to fight a war that can not be won. This is not to say the United States doesn’t have the power to change their lifestyle because this is undoutoubly not the case, the problem is what are we trying to change? The obvious answer is to end terrorism and violence and make them a civilized society, but this is no closer now then it was over five years ago when we began our crusade. We have also lost track of our initial intentions of finding and stopping terror. The search for Bin Laden and other terrorists’ organizations has been abandoned in a search for what appears to be power or in turn, oil. By changing our intentions in this war we have drastically changed the moral issues. When starting off trying to stop terror and save the lives of the innocent we were doing just that, trying to at least mildly disrupt the organized terror in the Middle East and save lives. This has now been lost in translation somewhere along the way and we have attempted to set up an entirely new government in a society that it appears we know nothing about.
Black Elk believes that it is morally wrong for us to try and change the culture of another civilization. He believes that we must fight for what we believe but not to attempt to conquer and control another’s lifestyle. Black Elk says that “there can never be peace between nations until there is first known that true peace which is within the souls of men.” This means that we will never be able to have peace in Iraq until we know and understand the culture in which they live, which at this point we do not so we will continue to fail until we can agree and understand.
Dostoyevsky believes that we must act with our hearts and that only irrational acts are free, because of this Dostoyevsky would decided that we morally should be in Iraq because we are acting irrationally and this in turn makes us free. He does not believe that acting irrationally means that you may act out of ignorance or that it is necessarily the right thing to do but does believe that it is acting freely. He also says that “a just cause is not ruined by a few mistakes” so just because we have gotten off track, does not mean we are not still fighting for a just cause of stopping terror.
It is very difficult to say how this issue is to be resolved; we are currently so deeply involved in the Iraqi society that pulling out completely could quite possibly crumble their entire civilization. Since we have arrested and killed Saddam and taken him completely out of the government they are currently in the process of designing an entirely new political system, this change is not going to be successful without the help of the United States. This does not mean that we should continue to intervene in the Iraqi everyday way of life, but does mean that we can not simply pull out our entire operation before we have completed the job. I believe that the best way for this situation to be resolved is to begin pulling soldiers out of Iraq slowly and stop making any attempts at causing any more battles with the Iraqi people. Our presence there is obviously going to upset many people and we are going to find ourselves in compromising situations, but we should not search for them. Instead we should use our power to build their government back up and teach them able to run it themselves, in their own way. This is the best way to go about it because they are not going to like the western influence running their lives but we can not simply just pull out or all of our work will crumble and we will be left in the same situation as we were before. Hopefully, we will be able to completely leave Iraq in the next few years, at least leave as much as we are present in any other country in the world. We do not need to focus on stopping the violence because we simply do not have the power and respect of the people to make that work.
The war in Iraq has brought about many moral dilemmas and it is difficult to come to a definite answer on what the right thing to do is, however, by studying the works of Black Elk and Dostoyevsky we can see peoples different views on the war and attempt to find common ground so we can make an effort to end this misguided war.