To Pull Out or not to Pull Out

With the recent release of the hundreds of thousands of government documents describing new war crimes committed by the US military, the question arises of what to do about these two unpopular wars.
A panel of four acclaimed writers and analysts met yesterday to discuss ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Each of the four experts discussed one at a time their thoughts on the two wars and ways to end it. Afterwards, they took questions from both supporting and opposing audience members.
The first of the four panelists to speak was Miriam Pemberton, author of the book Lesson from Iraq: Avoiding the Next War. Pemberton focused on the War in Iraq and the policies used that failed or were unethical. She picked a few lessons from her book she feels we should learn from and ensure our policy makers never make the same mistake again. These lessons include a preventative war doctrine, an imperialistic strategy involving US presence and operation in foreign countries, and torture as a means to extract information. She firmly believes that these mistakes and others made for this war to be unsuccessful and unpopular.
The second analyst to speak was Iraqi born Raed Jarrar and co-author of the Iraq War Blog. Jarrar focus was mainly on the recent release of the 400,000 documents released by Wikileaks regarding the War in Iraq. Admitting that he has only read about a dozen of the documents, he states that they do not actually give the people of Iraq, Afghanistan or even the US any information that is surprising.
The third speaker was Phyllis Bennis, author of the book Ending the US War in Afghanistan: A Primer. Bennis said her most important point she wanted to make on this war is many Americans are not convinced we should leave this war through moral arguments. Arguments like it is wrong to kill and stating how many lives have been lost on both sides, both military and civilian casualties are ineffective. She believes the argument we should be making is cost. She cites that the cost of one solider to be kept in Afghanistan for one year costs one million dollars. She states with the money spent on this war, we could be fixing all of our social problems.
The final speaker was Gareth Porter a historian and journalist as well as a policy analyst. His main point was the people need to understand why the policy makers brought us into these two wars, and then to mobilize to demand an exit from these wars. Porter feels that the US people are put at risk in order to serve the military. He quotes a military officer in the 90’s as saying “It is worth a few terrorist attacks against the US in order to be a superpower.”
All four speakers agreed we should pull out of the two wars and pursue diplomatic means to fix the two countries. One common theme was before we fix the mess we made and apologize, we need to pull out. Jarrar said “when you step on someone’s foot on a bus you don’t apologize and keep your foot there, you first move your foot, then apologize.”
Not everyone in the audience agreed with what four analysts had to say. One former military man and veteran of the War in Iraq, Blake said “You can’t rationalize with irrational people. And we can’t just pick up and leave like the panelists want. It’s not that simple.” However after making a similar statement to the panelists he was met with laughs and disrespect. And outside the Kay Center, a few kids passed him mocked and laughed at Blake. More discussion and intellegent discourse is needed in order for us to make the correct descion on these two wars.