What happens in Iraq is none of our business

The United States didn't have any business in Iraq in 2003, and it doesn't have any business there in 2014.

Sure, the Bush administration insisted the U.S. had to act because Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and might provide them to Islamic terrorists (even though they followed the Islamic sect that was his sect's enemy). There also was that little matter of protecting oil interests in Iraq, too. After all, no WMDs were found, but there still was plenty of oil interests to protect in Iraq.

Having rid the world of Saddam Hussein, the U.S. then set about rebuilding Iraq in our image, forcing democracy on a people to whom democracy is as foreign a concept as Islamic theocracy is to us. Then, after years of occupation, democracy building and the deaths of 4,489 Americans, the U.S. bid Iraq adieu with the final withdrawal of American forces in December 2011.

Of course, that seems to be a tradition of the Iraqi army; it's what they did in Kuwait in 1991, and it's what they did in 2003. Why we ever expected the Iraqis to defend themselves with that track record astounds me.Here we are 2½ years later and Iraq is torn asunder by sectarian violence with an organization called ISIS (which sounds like part of Cobra in G.I. Joe) steamrolling its way to Baghdad leaving death and destruction in its wake. The Iraqi army the U.S. spent so many years training turned tail and ran as fast as it could, abandoning weapons, vehicles and anything else they could leave behind — American-supplied weapons and vehicles.

So, as Iraq falls apart and ISIS — which has been in the middle of the chaos that is Syria, too — zooms to the top of the charts of Islamic terrorist groups, the question that arises is should the U.S. go back into Iraq to help bring order?

The answer thus far has been an overwhelming no from rank-and-file Americans.

Even with all the years of shaping and molding Iraq into something it never was and never could be, the U.S. has no business in Iraq and certainly does not need to send any more Americans to their deaths there. Our previous meddling in that part of the world only aggravated the troubles there and brought trouble onto ourselves.

By all rights, Iraq and other countries in that corner of the globe shouldn't have existed in the first place. After World War I, the allies divvied up the territories of the Middle East and Southwest Asia, drawing artificial and arbitrary borders. Instead of letting the various tribes and sects keep lands they'd had — and fought over — for thousands of years, they crammed Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds and others together into what to them were artificial countries. Those countries were created for Western financial and political benefits, not the people who lived there.

As a result, nearly a century later the different sects and tribes still fight over territory while the West continues trying to keep its artificial countries together. Imagine what the world today could have been like if we'd just left them to their own devices. We might not have the troubles we have now. Let's learn from that and stay out of their business today.

Some have wondered if the Americans who served and died and Iraq did so in vain. No, they didn't. They did what they were sent to do, and even acted above and beyond that as they tried to keep peace while politicians played games. They served honorably. No matter what our government did, or how it treats them now, our troops did not serve in vain.

But, we do not need to send them back to Iraq, to a fight that is not ours.