Posted on 06/27/2005 11:48:14 AM PDT by Gunner9mm
Kennedy's imaginery quagmire
June 27, 2005
On a scale of 1 to 10, my respect for Senator Ted Kennedy is about a minus 25. That was before I saw his vicious attack on Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld that was filled with lies and distortions that only a moveon.org radical left-wing idiot could appreciate.
Kennedy's tirade made me wonder where he gets his information. His characterization of the war in Iraq, especially his term "intractable quagmire" bears no resemblance to reality. I think all Kennedy did was dust off an old Viet Nam era anti-war diatribe, change Viet Nam to Iraq, and modify it a little to make it a hit piece against Rumsfeld specifically, and the military in general.
Here's a bit of what Kennedy said, "Secretary Rumsfeld, you know we are in serious trouble in Iraq. This war has been consistently and grossly mismanaged. And we are now in a seemingly intractable quagmire. Our troops are dying, and there really is no end in sight."
Compare that to what Karl Zinmeister, editor of The American Enterprise said, after he returned from his third trip to Iraq:
"I spent lots of time walking both neighborhoods this spring—something that would not have been possible a year earlier, when both were active war zones, where tanks poured shells into buildings on a regular basis. Today, the primary work of our soldiers in each area is rebuilding sewers, paving roads, getting buildings repaired and secured, supplying schools and hospitals, getting trash picked up, managing traffic, and encouraging honest local governance.
What the establishment media covering Iraq have utterly failed to make clear today is this central reality: With the exception of periodic flare-ups in isolated corners, our struggle in Iraq as warfare is over. Egregious acts of terror will continue—in Iraq as in many other parts of the world. But there is now no chance whatever of the U.S. losing this critical guerilla war.
Contrary to the impression given by most newspaper headlines, the United States has won the day in Iraq. In 2004, our military fought fierce battles in Najaf, Fallujah, and Sadr City. Many thousands of terrorists were killed, with comparatively little collateral damage. As examples of the very hardest sorts of urban combat, these will go down in history as smashing U.S. victories.
And our successes at urban combat (which, scandalously, are mostly untold stories in the U.S.) made it crystal clear to both the terrorists and the millions of moderate Iraqis that the insurgents simply cannot win against today’s U.S. Army and Marines. That’s why everyday citizens have surged into politics instead.
The terrorist struggle has hardly ended. Even a very small number of vicious men operating in secret will find opportunities to blow up outdoor markets and public buildings, assassinate prominent political figures, and knock down office towers. But public opinion is not on the insurgents’ side, and the battle of Iraq is no longer one of war fighting—but of policing and politics."
So who are we to believe? Zinmeister, an editor and reporter who has been embedded with the troops in Iraq three times? Zinmeister, who has written two books on his earlier experiences with coalition troops, who has seen the invasion and the war close up and personal?
Or Kennedy, who limits himself to reports in the Boston Globe and New York Times? Kennedy, who, through his lies and insults, denigrates the efforts of the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs when they tell him the truth? Kennedy, who cares more about pandering to the most radical of left-wing nutcases than he does for the fate of American warfighters or the war on terror?
The only intractable quagmire I see here is the mudhole that Kennedy and the vast majority of the Democrats insist on operating from.
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Thank you for your CLARITY, sb.
If we had had your CLARITY posted on a Freerepublic.com Forum starting back 40 years ago, discussing the Vietnam War and our terrorist enemy's compatriots here at home...
...a once Free South Vietnam would still be Free today.
Instead of our having to see:
Pictures of a vietnamese Re-Education Camp
http://www.Freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1308949/posts
At long last...
LOVE is coming to Vietnam.
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see #62, ooooooooooohhhhhhhhhhhhhh, good one.
Ran that one recently.
We can only dream of his retirement:
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