One, Two, Three, What Are We Fighting For?

Country Joe & The Fish asked that question back during the Viet Nam War

And it's one, two, three,
What are we fighting for ?
Don't ask me, I don't give a damn,
Next stop is Vietnam;
And it's five, six, seven,
Open up the pearly gates,
Well there ain't no time to wonder why,
Whoopee! we're all gonna die.

It was easy to ask that question back then because the Viet Nam War was so clearly pointless. But that is hardly the case today with Iraq. Now, our reasons for sending soldiers to die are clear.

At this point our soldier are fighting and dying for whatever reason anyone wants to put forth. Saddam revenge, kill the 9/11 attackers, free the Iraqis, bring democracy to the middle east, oh yes, and my favorite, to prevent the chaos in the region from becomming more chaotic.

But there's more. Here's a glimpse of what we are really fighting for. We are fighting so that a group of men belonging to the Yakidi religion can stone to death a 17 year old girl who converted to Islam, the religion of her boyfriend.
But we also want to be sure it doesn't end there, so our fighting in Iraq insured that

On April 23, gunmen stopped a bus carrying workers to her community, the village of Beshika 10 kilometres (six miles) outside Mosul, dragged out 23 Yazidis and shot them dead.

We all know that it is absolutely imperative that we allow religious bigotry to flower in Iraq and that the victims of such bigotry have ample opportunity to exact their revenge.

That's not all, though. Our troops are also fighting, bleeding and dying to insure that the Iraqi government can mimic Saddam, Bush's favorite nemesis, by preventing Iraqi doctors from leaving the country. That's right. What was good enough for Saddam is good enough for al Maliki and is certainly something worth our troops dying for. As reported by the Post

Iraq is hemorrhaging doctors as violence racks the nation. To stem the flow, the Iraqi government has recently taken a cue from Saddam Hussein: Medical schools are once again forbidden to issue diplomas and transcripts to new graduates.

Hussein built a fine medical system in part by withholding doctors' passports and diplomas. Although physicians can work in Iraq with a letter from a medical school verifying their graduation, they say they need certificates and transcripts to work abroad.

It is a common refrain among war-weary Iraqis that things were better before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. Electricity in Baghdad was more reliable; sectarian hostility was rare; Iraq was safe -- except for the many victims of Hussein's tyranny. But rarely has the government embraced a policy that so harshly evokes the era of dictatorship. To some students and doctors, the diploma decision, like Iraq's crumbling medical system, provides clear proof of the government's helplessness and the nation's decline.

But that isn't all we are fighting for . No, we also want to make our troops die for a country that thinks reporters should be killed and press offices destroyed if the press has the audacity to criticize religious leaders.

Hundreds of angry Shiites poured onto the streets of two cities south of the Iraqi capital Friday to protest what they considered insults by Al-Jazeera television against Iraq's most revered Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.

The protesters were angered by an Al-Jazeera talk show this week in which the presenter questioned al-Sistani's leadership credentials.

* * * *

"Yes, yes to al-Sistani," read banners carried by some of the 1,000 protesters in Basra, Iraq's second largest city. They gathered outside the local offices of Iraq's largest Shiite political party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, or SCIRI, which has close links to al-Sistani.

In the holy Shiite city of Najaf, where al-Sistani lives, several hundred protesters marched in the city's old quarter in solidarity.

"Today, we burn down Al-Jazeera," chanted the protesters who carried portraits of al-Sistani. Others demanded that the channel as well as Qatar be sued. One Najaf protester carried several pictures of Qatar's emir, Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, with a shoe hoisted on the images to show contempt for him.

Now that's certainly worth fighting and dying for. I bet we could increase recruiting if we put that on a poster.

Uncle Sam Needs You To Protect Imams By Killing The Press

That would sure go over big in the Bible belt. Of course everyone knows that these are only some of the reasons we are fighting. These are important but not nearly as important as what this war does for our economy. If we we weren't fighting and dying over there we couldn't sell nearly as much ammunition as we need to to keep the economy humming.

The Bush administration told Congress on Friday of plans to sell Iraq about 400 million rounds of small arms ammunition, 170,000 grenades, demolition explosives and other military gear and services valued at up to $508 million.

Now that's a cause everyone can embrace. You can't sell bullets if you don't shoot bullets. Sure some of those bullets are going to wound maim or kill our soldiers, but everyone has to do their part to keep the economy humming.

Besides that, if we didn't keep fighting we wouldn't see the kind of progress we are seeing in Iraq. How could things be going any better? Friday: 6 GIs, 71 Iraqis Killed; 89 Iraqis Wounded Six American soldiers killed is proof positive that we are winning and everyone knows that winning is the ultimate goal. If you stop fighting, you lose.

So that must be it. The administration has finally arrived at the seminal reason for the war. We Fight So That We Can Win.

This conflict is so utterly pointless and tragic that it has become a bloody parody of itself.