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."

I am as Un-PC a person as you will ever find. But I cannot subscribe to what I call "The Glass Parking Lot" course of action. I am sick at heart anytime I hear about our troops being injured or killed by IED's or some kind of terrorist sponsored activity. But to say we should just load up about 100 B-52's with a full internal load of 50 Mark 82's and lay waste to Ramadi or anywhere else (as I have heard many people in the Freeper community advocate) is just not a logical option. Believe me, there are times when I think that would be a good idea, such as when those savages hung the charred corpses from the bridge outside Fallujah or on 9/11, but think for a minute.

If you ask yourself the question of why we have fought the way we have in Iraq and Afghanistan, the logical (in my opinion) reason is because we want to try to find a way to make ourselves safer. In the view of those forming policy in our country, that means (from a Mulsim perspective) making your education, family, job, friends, community and future MORE important and valuable than strapping explosives on your chest and walking into a pizza joint full of unbelievers and detonating yourself.

This is not World War II...we are not desperate enough to roll over civilians with tanks, carpet bomb or drop a nuclear weapon. In WWII, things WERE different. There was no pre-determined outcome (although many people today look at the allied victory as a forgone conclusion) and we were engaged in a life or death struggle. It was clearly going to be all of us or all of them, and we knew in advance what life under their heel was going to be like.

Now, if some Islamic terrorists set off a nuclear weapon in one of our cities (or perpetrate some other thing resulting in mass casualties on a scale or frequency dwarfing 9/11, I will be the first one to support a glass parking lot or some other equivalent response in certain localities.

But we cannot do that now. I understand many disagree with me on this, but I assure you, my reluctance does not stem from any kind of guilt. It stems from proportionality.

I often find it useful, when trying to formulate my personal stand on a given issue, to delineate the spectrum by "driving a stake in the ground" at either end of the spectrum which can be agreed upon by the majority of people, or at least most people know.

For example, in this case, most of us (but I guarantee not all of us) could agree that Islamofacist terrorists killing one person would not be just cause for dropping a nuclear weapon on a capitol city in the Middle East. So that would be one end. On the other hand, Islamofacists setting off a nuclear weapon in a large American city and killing millions of people would be just cause for choosing an appropriate target or targets to drop a thermonuclear device on. Perhaps Tehran, perhaps Damascus. But it would not be unreasonable to think that some measure of evidence pointing in a direction might be adequate to choose a target and act on it. So that might be the other end.

The issue is, where is the point, contained in that defined spectrum I just outlined, that would serve as a threshold?

A hundred dead? A thousand? Ten thousand? A hundred thousand?

A million?

I readily admit that the threshold will be different for many people. Mine is just higher than some, less than others. There are people who would push the button even if nobody had been killed, and there are others who would rather die and see all we know obliterated before THEY would push the button, which means 'Never".

I personally just do not think we are at the point where we can drop 5000 500lb bombs in a single raid on an undefended city with unevacuated civilians.

Or a nuclear weapon.

Again, this is MY opinion, I understand others feel differently.What we are trying to do in Iraq is magnificent. We are shedding blood and spending money to try to break the cycle over in that part of the world. Sure, it is in our best interests. We all stand to gain a lot if it works. We could just grab the oil while we are there, but we aren't.

We had 3000 of our citizens killed in just a couple of hours.
We would have been justified in carpet bombing and taking the damned countries over there by force, but we didn't.

It's not what we do. In WWII we could have taken and held as our own nearly any territory we occupied, but we didn't. We gave it back to the people who attacked us, and whose butts we kicked. It is the American way.

Now, we are giving those people a chance at choosing their own government, even if it (as seems likely) is a hostile one towards us. So be it. The process we embarked on in April 2003 may succeed, or it may ultimately fail. If we end up in a full scale conflagration in the Middle East, it cannot be said we did not try the humane approach to stamp out this festering, stinking thing called Islamofacism. And before we try the other approaches, it is the right way, and the American way to attempt it as we have.

Thanks for insightful post. What you stated neeeds to be restated again and again.

The problem with the Cut-and-Run solution is that all the problems that existed with the Hussein regime in power will return in an even more virulent form if we leave.

No matter how badly people kid themselves in these threads we will need access to Middle Eastern Oil for at least the next ten years no matter how aggressively we pursue alternative energy resources. To ignore this reality is to take a childish view of the National Interest.

We also need to recognize at this critical juncture of history it was "the Realists" who helped set the stage for Islamo-Fascism by propping up one "strongman" after another in the name of "pragmatism".

Such pragmatism has benefited us in the short term but was ultimately responsible for not eliminating Hussein after the first Gulf War and can ultimately be held responsible for the the Islamo-Fascist regime in Iran and the various Islamic Brotherhood cells throughout the world.

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