Are We Responsible For This?

I don't know about you, but prior to our invasion of Iraq, I didn't consider the casual suicide bombing incident. Moreover, it was clear to me that we had no cause to feel remotely responsible for this nutty behavior.

This all changed when George Bush pulled the trigger and decided that invading Iraq was good for our national security (and worth doing over say spending more money on public schools or homes for the homeless in the USA, but that's another post). These days, I feel like crying when I read reports such as this:

For the second time in two days, a suicide bomber struck outside a Shiite mosque in Diyala Province north of Baghdad on Thursday, as worshipers prepared for one of the most important days in the Shiite calendar. The police and witnesses said at least 11 people were killed.

Sure, no American casualties occurred in this instance, but the bigger question is to what degree are we responsible for this event? If we had not gone into Iraq would there be an environment there that would prevent such attacks? Do we bear some burden of responsibility for the deaths?

I know some would say "no, it's the bombers own." On the flip side, if we were not there, perhaps there would have been no cause for this bomber to execute these people. Thus, the causal relationship could be drawn that indicates we own some sliver of responsibility for it. What say you?

On another front, I can't imagine what it would be like to live in a place where suicide bombers were a fact of life, but this quote sheds some light on it:

People go to the bazaar and make jokes: ‘Is this going to be my last trip?’HUMAIR BILOUR, on violence by militants in Peshawar, Pakistan.

I still think that if we had, instead of launching a massive and massively expensive operation in Iraq and directed our resources toward thousands of surgical operations executed by expertly trained special forces units, we could and would have produced a much better climate in the Middle East at this point in time. More importantly, we would have perhaps captured or killed those who would do us harm rather than the massive amounts of civilians that are the collateral damage justified by the Bush Administration in their glorious "freedom spreading" experiment.

Unfortunately, that's not the way our "leaders" directed the operations. And in the end, I do believe, that we bear the burden of some responsibility for these types of events, which is most certainly not an improvement over the way things were before we invaded Iraq.

What say you blogosphere?

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