There are many good arguments against staying in Iraq, and there are many good arguments for staying, yet in every debate that I've heard over the issue, someone resorts to the type of simplistic thinking that got us into this mess in the first place. Certainly, Igor Pedan's Op-ed piece "What would you really die for?" is no exception. Pedan argues that America needs to pull out of Iraq immediately because he would not risk his life "to bring democracy to Fallujah" and that since we are all at college, clearly, we wouldn't risk our own lives either.According to Pedan's argument, everything is black and white; the soldiers are all innocent kids trying to pay for college, the government is made up entirely of vicious warmongers, and Iraq was just peacefully minding their business before America came in. It is exactly this type of counterdependence that has hampered American liberalism for the last four years. Instead of developing an independent opinion, people just wait to see what Bush does so that they know what to disagree wholeheartedly with. The same people who freaked out about Bush using the phrase "axis of evil" are more than willing to write him off as an evil man without a shred of intelligence or decency. Until we stop being so simplistic about the problem, we won't be able to find a viable solution.

Just because I did not choose to risk my life does not mean that we should leave Iraq today. We made a mess and we have to clean it up for the sake of the world. What Pedan and so many other "liberals" like him fail to see is that the world does not revolve around them. Their personal happiness is not priority number one for the world. Just because you would not die for a cause does not mean it's not a cause worth dying for. I'm not saying that our war in Iraq is neccesarily a cause worth dying for, but I'm saying that we need to stop thinking in extremes and start trying to find a solution that actually works. History has shown us that invading and then abandoning doesn't work. Just because we shouldn't have gone into Iraq doesn't mean we have to come out right away. The problem is that people are not actually debating what to do in Iraq, they're still fighting over whether we should be there in the first place. Who cares? Arguing about it now won't change anything. We failed to stop it before it started, now we need to make the best of a bad situation. What frightens me more than anything else is that the people who keep making the Vietnam comparison are the same people demanding we leave Iraq immediately. Apparently knowing your history isn't enough to keep you from repeating your mistakes.