If you listen to John Kerry, and his Democrat surrogates, if you follow the Iraq coverage in the major newspapers and on the network news, you'd swear the war had been going on for roughly a decade. Posted on 03/19/2004 12:37:06 PM PST by South40
It's hard to believe that the war in Iraq started barely a year ago.
If you listen to John Kerry, and his Democrat surrogates, if you follow the Iraq coverage in the major newspapers and on the network news, you'd swear the war had been going on for roughly a decade.
That was, of course, the duration of major U.S. combat involvement in the Vietnam War, the hugely unpopular conflict, which claimed more than 58,000 American lives, to which the Kerry Democrats and their friends in the media liken the Iraq War.
Their object is to dampen public approval of the Bush administration's prosecution of the war and its handling of Iraq's postwar reconstruction. The better to turn the despised Republican out of office in November.
So as America marks the one-year anniversary of the Iraq War, the anti-war Democrats, the Bush haters, suggest that both the military campaign and the postwar effort to transform Iraq into a peaceable, pluralistic democracy have failed.
They seem to derive almost perverse delight in every setback in Iraq – like this week's deadly bombing of a Baghdad hotel – viewing it as vindication of their opposition to the war, their contempt for the nation's commander in chief.
"We are still bogged down in Iraq," lamented Kerry, speaking this week at George Washington University. "What we have seen is a steady loss of lives and mounting cost in dollars with no end in sight."
Yet, Kerry and other critics – like Howard Dean, who attributed last week's terror attacks in Spain to the Iraq War – refuse to acknowledge all the positive developments in Iraq over the past year.
The war critics, the Bush haters, refuse to accept that the Iraq War left the long-suffering people of Iraq better off.
They refuse to believe that America's willingness to take action against Saddam Hussein's rogue regime – before, rather than after, it committed or facilitated an atrocity of the magnitude of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks – produced dividends in the war on terror.
But let us examine what has transpired since the first cruise missiles were fired in the Iraq War.
The U.S. military waged one of the most successful military campaigns in modern history, routing Saddam Hussein's vaunted forces in a mere three weeks.
What made it all the more remarkable was that the Pentagon deployed less than half the ground forces that were used in the 1991 Gulf War and only two-thirds of air assets.
Coalition forces identified 55 individuals as the most wanted members of the Saddam's deposed regime, many if not most of whom were culpable for unspeakable crimes against the Iraqi people, from torture to mass executions to genocide.
All but a handful have been caught or killed, including Saddam's sons, Odai and Qusai who met their maker last July, and the dictator himself, whom coalition forces snatched out of the rat hole in which he was hiding last December.
Saddam's capture made quite an impression upon at least one former terror-supporting regime. For Libya president Moammar Gadhafi reached an agreement with the United States and Great Britain to renounce weapons of mass destruction and allow international verification.
Meanwhile, the United States created an Iraqi Governing Council, with representatives from Iraqi's Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish populations, to draft an interim constitution and oversee the democratic election of a coalition government.
The council unanimously approved the interim constitution this month, and the United States is planning to hand over the reins of government to the Iraqi sometime this upcoming summer.
And for all the hardship the Iraqi people have endured over the past year, during and after the war, they are grateful that the United States has liberated them from Saddam.
Indeed, in a just-released nationwide poll, co-sponsored by ABC News, the BBC, the German broadcast network ARD and the NHK in Japan, an overwhelming 70 percent of Iraqis say that things are going well for them today.
Only 15 percent say they want coalition forces to leave the country now. Most want U.S., British and allied troops to remain in Iraq at least until an indigenous government is in place and law and order firmly established throughout the country.
These are the successes that have been achieved in Iraq in just the past year, developments for which the American people can be proud of their country.
That is, those Americans who are not so blinded by their opposition to the Iraq War, their animus toward Bush, that they cannot bring themselves to concede that Iraq is not the second coming of Vietnam.
It has! We've had "no fly" zones, cruise missile attacks, etc. etc. etc. It was only in the last year we tried to win this war.
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