Colleen Callahan, Democratic candidate for the 18th Congressional District, has announced that she advocates ending the war and withdrawing troops according to an “orderly time line.”

Callahan, whose husband Dick is a Vietnam veteran, visited Iraq and Afghanistan in 2003 at her own expense while accompanying the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture. She said she saw first-hand the destruction war causes and likely would not have voted in favor of the war.

That’s so easy to say now, knowing what we know now. It’s like saying, “If I were Buddy Holly, I would have taken the bus on February 3, 1959.” Yeah, obviously. Even if she were to argue that at the time, based on what she knew then, she wouldn’t have voted to go to war, so what? We don’t have a DeLorean with a flux capacitor that will allow us to go back in time and change that decision. We have to deal with what is, not what we believe should have been.

Until a stable government is operating, it would be misguided foreign policy and, frankly, immoral, to simply abandon the Iraqi people. Violence and genocide would ensue after withdrawal, resulting in millions of Iraqi deaths. That would embitter the Iraqi people (and further embitter others in the region) against the U. S., and our enemies (al-Qa’ida) would be able to parlay that into more violence against us, as well.

But perhaps the most disappointing thing is Callahan’s reason for pulling our troops out of Iraq — economics:

“Just imagine what we could do with an extra $12 billion a month [that we wouldn’t be spending on the war]: focus on relief of high gas prices, develop a functional health care system, begin infrastructure improvements and fund the war on drugs and crime in our own community,” she said Wednesday in front of the World Wars I and II Memorial in the Peoria County Courthouse Plaza.

Is this really a good reason to pull out of Iraq — so we can have more money to feed our oil addiction and start new government entitlement programs? Let Iraq descend into wanton violence and genocide so we can have cheap gas and government-funded health care? How callous and provincial is that?