A Message to All the Cut and Run Freepers Currently Polluting Free Republic

I'm reading an astonishing number of comments on Free Republic these days by posters who have joined the ranks of the anti-American left in calling for an immediate withdrawal from Iraq. Some claim to have military experience, some claim to be patriotic Americans and some claim to be smarter than the rest.

These posters are joining the Murtha-Rangel-McDermott treason caucus. Oh, they say they love the troops, but their decision to abandon them in the field speaks otherwise.

Three years ago, the United States led an international coalition to rid the world of one of the worst regimes on the planet. Saddam Hussein was an international terrorist: He financed terrorism, he trained terrorists and he harbored terrorists. He waged war on Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Israel. He waged war on the people of Iraq, including genocidal campaigns against the Kurds in the north and the marsh Arabs in the south.

Saddam successfully subverted the Oil-for-Food program and was wearing down support for continuing the sanctions keeping him in check.

He had numerous contacts with al Qaeda over the years. He tried to assassinate a former U.S. president. He maintained research capabilities to implement nuclear, chemical and biological weapons as soon as the sanctions were lifted. There is evidence that some of these programs would have been operational within a year even with the sanctions in place.

The decision to remove Saddam and his regime as part of the Global War on Terror was correct.

Three-and-a-half years after Iraq and the world were liberated from Saddam and his terrorist regime, there are those on Free Republic who are clamoring to give up, surrender, cut and run, stab the troops in the back, betray the Iraqis, betray our allies in the GWOT, spit on the graves of our fallen heroes and join Cindy Sheehan, Medea Benjamin and Ramsey Clark in bringing about America's defeat in the GWOT.

It's only been three-and-a-half years--only six months since the freely elected government in Iraq was formed. In that time, what has been called a mini-Marshall Plan of construction and reconstruction has come to fruition. The Iraqis have held three national elections, they have held numerous local elections, fourteen out of eighteen Iraq provinces are relatively peaceful and stable.

Six months ago, when the Iraqi government was formed, the experts said the war would be taken to Baghdad because our enemies in the region could not abide the example of a free, democratic society in the Middle East. For once, the experts were right. The battle of Baghdad has been a prolonged Tet Offensive style operation of headline-grabbing attacks intended to sap the morale of Americans and Iraqis alike.

From what I've been reading on Free Republic lately, a lot of Freepers have fallen for the enemy's ploy and are howling like barking moonbats for our immediate withdrawal from Iraq. Some of that talk is couched in talk of 'we're fighting a PC war like Vietnam!' The soldiers I met in Iraq recently told Debra Argel Bastian to pass on a message to the Vietnam vets criticizing the war: With all due respect to your service, this is not Vietnam. It is not being fought like Vietnam. Please let us finish our mission.

But our enemy is playing the Vietnam ploy to great benefit. They know they can count on the American and world media to broadcast their propaganda. They work with leftist Americans to sabotage the war effort at home. They know these leftist Americans have allies in the Democratic party. They know they do not need a military victory--only political and psychological victories are needed to defeat America.

There are those who argue that murder and dictatorship is the mindset of the Middle East and that will not be changed by our actions. Funny how those who smugly denigrate the Arab peoples' capacity for freedom forget the wholesale slaughter of millions of Westerners by Westerners at the hands of Western dictatorships just a few generations past.

I hear complaints that the Iraqis aren't standing up. Yet, to use one common example, when police recruits are slaughtered in bombings, Iraqis line up the next day at the same recruiting center. The insurgency is small in number, but they are able to do enough damage on a daily basis to stretch out the time it will take to secure the whole of Iraq.

At this time of our testing, the American people are starting to go wobbly. Sadly, many Freepers are too. Our troops and their Commander-in-Chief are not, thank God. It's only been three-and-a-half years. The progress made has been phenomonal. Throw in the towel now, and you'll just have the terrorists follow us home. Everyone knows that, including you. I'm not willing to pay that price, not now, not ever, but you are.

Let me close by offering similar sentiments recently offered by two men 'in the know' on the situation in Iraq who are not giving up. First, Kurdish Regional Government Prime Minister Barzani: "When I was in the United States recently and read the negative news in the Washington Post, New York Times and in the network TV broadcasts, I even wondered if things had gotten so bad since I had left that I shouldn't return."

Next, Gen. Abizaid: "When I come to Washington, I feel despair. When I'm in Iraq with my commanders, when I talk to our soldiers, when I talk to the Iraqi leadership, they are not despairing."

Yes, we are at war but it is not all-out war.

We have not been successful in fighting limited wars. Since the end of World War II, we have had no truly successful limited wars in the Third World. (Desert Storm was a job left unfinished.) When we went to war with Britain (1812), Mexico (1848), Spain (1898), the Central Powers (1917) and the Axis (1941), we used a declaration of war, and we fought all out. That’s why we won.

Things began to go wrong in Korea.

In its present era of decay, it is difficult to imagine the enthusiasm that greeted the establishment of the United Nations as the replacement for the dead and ineffectual League of Nations. Unlike the old League, the UN had police powers and the teeth to enforce them, and it faced its first great test in Korea.

In theory, the Korean War was a “police action” controlled by the United Nations and involving a multi-lateral force. Because of this, a declaration of war was not used. The UN was the belligerent power, and a congressional authorization of our participation was considered sufficient.

When the Korean adventure went sour after China’s intervention, there were no anti-war demonstrations, although the country was angry enough to change parties in 1952. What kept the lid on dissent was the Cold War.

But the Cold War itself was a problem. Let’s go back a bit.

When Stalin made clear he was not going to honor the promises made at Yalta and Teheran, George Kennan, the American ambassador to Moscow, wrote a document known to history as the “Long Telegram,” that was published in Foreign Affairs under the pseudonym “X.” Kennan argued that the best way to handle the Soviets was a policy of Containment. Once Soviet expansionist tendencies were contained, Kennan argued, the country’s internal contradictions would tear it apart. But Containment ran afoul of the traditional policy of disarmament after war. Now there would be the need for a full-time mobilization, to include a military draft and a large standing army. We were at war, yet we were not at war.

Nuclear weapons and their increasingly rapid means of delivery only complicated the situation. A nuclear Pearl Harbor would not permit the usual deliberative custom of a declaration of war. American war policy became linked to the determination of when the use of nuclear weapons would be countenanced and under what circumstances. The world had become more complicated.

Upon entering office in 1953, Dwight Eisenhower faced the challenge of fighting the Cold War and honoring the Constitution at the same time. Like the Framers, Eisenhower knew his Roman history and understood the risk of maintaining a large standing army. Facing a war-like situation with the Soviet Union and China, Eisenhower decided to use the congressional budget process to get around the Constitution’s two-year requirement for the authorization of a standing army.

The creation of the Central Intelligence Agency opened up another can of constitutional worms. In addition to intelligence gathering, the CIA’s covert operations directorate had the job of destabilizing and even overthrowing governments with which we were not at war. In some cases, the agency even destabilized governments of friendly nations. There were no declarations of war or congressional authorizations involved in these exercises. Instead, the instrument of choice was the presidential finding, a document that was usually classified.

The CIA’s budget was classified and buried in the budgets of other agencies, a violation of the Constitution. Only a few key people in Congress, whose names were never divulged, were the keepers of the CIA’s “black budget”, and a small group in Congress possessed oversight power over CIA activities. “Black ops” were designed to give deniability to the president and others responsible for the agency. Thus, the CIA was able to overthrow the governments of Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954) without detection at the time.

War had now gone underground, and even the appearance of preparation for a shooting war could lead to the commencement of nuclear hostilities. At a cabinet meeting in 1961, Attorney General Robert Kennedy argued that Communist gains around the world required President Kennedy to declare a state of emergency and launch a full mobilization. Secretary of State Dean Rusk pointed out how a similar mobilization in 1914 had created a hair-trigger situation where one poorly considered, precipitous move had led to general war. An American mobilization would inevitably lead to a Soviet mobilization, a hair-trigger situation, and then someone would make a foolish mistake. In the nuclear age, full mobilization was now an act of war. Robert Kennedy withdrew his suggestion.

But Vietnam was where we really blew it.

In 1959, Dr. Henry Kissinger of Harvard wrote an article in Foreign Affairs, “The Twilight Struggle”, that revolutionized American foreign policy. Kissinger argued that the stakes of nuclear war had become so unacceptably high that the conflict between America and the Soviet Union would be fought in the Third World in the form of “wars of liberation.” To compete in this arena would require Americans to fight long-term limited wars in obscure parts of the globe. Kissinger did not suggest using American ground forces but favored supporting pro-American governments in this effort.

The initial American involvement in Vietnam was a congressionally authorized deployment of American forces as military advisors to the government of South Vietnam, and the deployment was multinational, supported by such nations as Australia and South Korea. US Army Col. John Paul Vann arrived and saw a nation of Vietnamese-speaking Buddhists governed by an elite group of French-speaking Catholics. He saw a president of South Vietnam who was ascetic to the point of being a holy man, but who was not strong enough to prevent his family from stealing everything that wasn’t nailed down. What disturbed Vann most was the unwillingness of South Vietnam’s army to fight and the unwillingness of the country’s president to make it fight.

Success in the military does not come from delivering bad news to one’s superiors. Vann met with Lyndon Johnson in 1964, gave him the bad news, but offered him a way out – sending American ground forces to take over the fighting.

Following a questionable incident at the Gulf of Tonkin, Johnson procured a congressional authorization to send ground troops to Vietnam. A declaration of war was rejected because of the multinational nature of the initial effort and the fear of Soviet and Chinese reaction to such a declaration on one of their client states.

But there was another – unstated – reason directly tied to Kissinger’s theory. As experienced in World War II, a declaration of war would lead to strong passions on the part of the American people. Should a crisis erupt in Vietnam that escalated tensions with the Soviet Union or China, political passions might make it impossible for an American president to back down. Great powers do not like to lose face. The loss of room for maneuver could easily turn a limited war into a nuclear war; thus Vietnam had to be a passionless war.

Without a declaration of war, there was nothing to get Americans to agree to march in step “to total victory!” and the door was opened to public dissent. In 1965, when Johnson spoke in El Paso, he witnessed his first antiwar demonstration. Police roughed up the demonstrators and then arrested them for disorderly conduct. This was what one would have expected under World War II Rules, but it was not to last.

As the quagmire deepened, public resistance to the war stiffened. Some felt that Vietnam – without our interference – would eventually evolve to look something like Sweden, a point espoused by Frances Fitzgerald in her book, Fire in the Lake. Others who were pro-Communist rooted for an American defeat. Still others felt this chapter of the Cold War was a policy mistake. But most simply did not want to be drafted to fight a no-win war when the American homeland was not threatened.

September 11, 2001 changed everything. American popular passions had been aroused, and President Bush issued an ultimatum to the world: “You are either with us or against us.” But there was no declaration of war.

Some would argue that al-Qaeda was not a sovereign entity. But intelligence had long shown that many sovereign nations had been involved, directly or peripherally. Afghanistan had provided al-Qaeda with a base of operations, Pakistan’s military and intelligence forces had provided tactical support, and Saudi Arabia had provided financial support as a way of paying al-Qaeda to leave it alone. The fingerprints of many Islamic nations were all over 9/11.

However, a declaration of war would have galvanized opposition throughout the Islamic world, and the US would not have been able to take on all enemies at once with conventional forces. (And Pakistan is a nuclear power.) A nuclear response and a massive mobilization via a military draft would have been the only way to end the threat quickly, but the first use of nuclear weapons would have galvanized opposition from the entire world.

The chosen approach was to fight one limited war after another in a controlled fashion under the umbrella of the UN, as Desert Storm had been fought. The idea was not to escalate piecemeal as in Vietnam, but to go in quickly with overwhelming force, crush the enemy’s military, conquer him – and then democratize and rebuild him as we had rebuilt Germany and Japan after World War II.

The war in Afghanistan followed the pattern of Desert Storm, as a coalition of nations worked with the US under UN approval to remove the Taliban from power. But the war in Iraq proved to be more problematic, as EU nations opposed the effort. Some EU nations wanted to preserve the lucrative business arrangements they had with Iraq, and others wanted an Iraq with weapons of mass destruction to function as a counterweight to keep a nuclear Israel under control. (The same nations today oppose American action against Iran because Iran has now assumed the counterweight function.)

But the problem with the Iraqi people has its roots in a profound misunderstanding of the Third World.

Back in 1960, Barry Goldwater wrote The Conscience of a Conservative (actually ghostwritten by the grandfather of L. Brent Bozell) and said therein that the mania by the UN and the Foreign Policy Community of the US to transplant democracy to the Third World was misguided. The only countries that had made democracy work were those who had been exposed to English Common Law, either by culture or by conquest. Goldwater argued that there were people on this planet who were just not ready for democracy. The best they and we could hope for was a benevolent despot, preferably one allied with the US and not the Soviets. (The MSM was brutal to Goldwater on this subject.)

The current American approach to war is a remnant of the Cold War, when the enemy had nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them. We need to rethink this approach.

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