Our generation has never known a time when the United States wasn’t engaged in perpetual war.
Since 1991, the U.S. has been fighting one conflict after another like George Orwell’s novel, “1984,” where the country Oceana is at war in a distant land with an unknown foe that frequently changes. The U.S. is waging perpetual war in the Middle East, just like Orwell’s Oceana.
ISIL, the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, is an Islamic terrorist group that has been traversing the Middle East, taking over cities and murdering those who have different ideological views, focusing on those not of the Islamic faith. They have released gruesome recordings of its members beheading journalists and other innocents to spread their message of hate.
The beheadings of some prisoners ISIL has taken have caused the uproar to take action against the terrorist organization. It’s frightening to think that humans can treat one another with such a lack of emotion or care for another’s life to the point where we can behead a person on camera and display it to the public.
If the U.S. decides to go to war with ISIL, it will legitimize the group as valid threat and give ISIL what they want – more attention to their cause. The U.S. shouldn’t take part in their sick games and should avoid starting another war in the Middle East. Fighting a religious war is not something we should want to be involved with. It hasn’t worked for the us in the past and there is no reason to expect it will work for us this time.
The U.S. has been bombing important ISIL targets, but continuing to bomb ISIL targets could drag us into a ground war with the group. The U.S. shouldn’t be willing to waste its resources on these bombings, nor should we send weapons over to groups fighting ISIL.
In our history of supplying arms to groups in the Middle East, we have found ourselves fighting those we thought we were helping later on. We inadvertently armed ISIL with weapons we had supplied to the Iraqi army after the conflicts in Iraq. When ISIL troops moved into Iraq, the Iraqi army that the U.S. had built, fled and abandoned the weapons we supplied them with.
Orwell may have wrote about perpetual war in 1949.
But in 2014, we are living it.
