Posted on 01/18/2007 7:50:55 AM PST by jveritas
The most lasting tragedy of the Vietnam War is that it has legitimized “giving aid and comfort to the enemy”. We are seeing the giving of aid and comfort to the enemy running wild in this war on terror and sadly not only among liberals and their media but also among some conservatives who some of them are right here on this great Free Republic.
When Al Qaeda terrorists, or the terrorist regimes in Iran and Syria, or the Iraqi insurgent terrorists whether they are Sunnis or Shia hear the speeches of defeatism coming from liberals and their media, or unfortunately coming from some conservatives who some of them are right here on Free Republic, will they feel comforted and aided by these speeches? Of course they will be comforted, and they will be embolden to fight more and more, kill more and more, destroy more and more, because they realize that many Americans do not have the will to fight a long and hard war.
Defeatism and providing aid and comfort to the enemy was something that we expected from liberals and their media because their hate to President Bush and the Republican Party is hundred of times more than their hate to the terrorists. However it is really sad that some conservatives and some members on this great forum are doing their share in providing aid and comfort to the enemy through their defeatist attitude.
Do the defeatists want to amend the Constitution so we will have the following? Stop the war and leave if we lose more than one thousand troops, or stop the war and leave if it lasts more than one year, or stop the war and leave if it costs more than 50 billions dollars, whichever comes first. Do they want to do this?
The defeatists who argue that Iraq is not part of the war on terror but rather it is just a civil war between Sunnis and Shia are wrong and naive beyond belief. Iraq is most definitely the central and most important front in the war on terror. It is in Iraq where Al Qaeda and their local Iraqi allies decided to fight the US. It is in Iraq where the islamic terrorists from all over the world are pouring in to fight the Americans. It is in Iraq where the terrorist regimes of Iran and Syria and their local Iraqi allies want to defeat the US so they can have total control of the Middle East. Since the terrorists are all over the world, then the best way to fight them is to attract them to one place to kill them. Whether it was planned or not, Iraq turned out to be the magnet that has been attracting the terrorists from all over the world, and that is the ultimate way to fight the war on terror and to kill as many terrorists as we can.
Every defeatist who is giving aid and comfort to the enemy should ask himself or herself this question: What will happen if we leave Iraq before we achieve complete victory? The First thing that will happen is that the enemy will be embolden beyond belief and the terrorists whether they are Sunnis or Shia, whether they are Al Qaeda, or Iran or Syria, will be given the ultimate victory that will embolden them thousands more time then when they were emboldened when the US left Beirut after the Marines barracks terrorist attack in 1983, or when the US left Somalia in 1993 after the terrorist killed 19 troops, or when no reprisal happened against the terrorists when they attacked many American targets through out the Clinton years. If our passiveness to the past terrorist attacks emboldened them in such a way to attack us on 9/11, think about what they can do to us if we give and leave Iraq and thus handle them the ultimate victory that they have been dreaming about for decades.
The defeatists must understand that if few terrorists sitting in a cave in Afghanistan with a small budget and few volunteers were able to do the 9/11 terrorist attacks, killed 3000 Americans, and caused over one trillion dollars in economic damages, then the terrorists control of Iraq and of the whole Middle East, and its vast oil resources will allow them to conduct terrorist attacks against us that we cannot imagine even in our worst nightmares. By controlling Iraq and the Middle East the terrorists will have hundreds of billions of dollars under their control that they will use it to attack us everywhere in the world and the US and cause unimaginable death, destruction and economic losses that will make 9/11 terrorist attacks look like a picnic in comparison. They will also use the oil weapon to bring the world economy to a disaster that will be many folds worse than that of the 1929 Depression.
Fellow Free Republic members, we are fighting the most important war since WW II. We are not fighting for the Iraqis in Iraq but we are fighting for ourselves, for our freedom and for our way of life. Let us all support our President and our brave troops because they need our support now more than ever.
Some might say you're kicking a stump!
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TANKS for the ping,,,
More like "Kickin' the Dawg" here,,,IMHO,,,
I even saw one post that wanted the mods to give out
personal info to track-down all who are not in Perfect
Agreement on the conduct of this war,,,Were they for real ?
Calling folks "Traitors" because they disagree with
each other Ain't how I was raised...
Now, you can complain that he did this but I think he was facing a choice: either keep the economy going OR put the nation on an austere war footing, which would, I grant you, have made people realize we are at war. In the process, however, we would have seen a collapse of the economy when people went into a panic and stayed at home.
This is a decision that is a tough one for anyone who is in the Oval Office. Maybe he was wrong on this, but to castigate him for this decision is saying that it was an easy choice and he chose poorly. That is not the truth.
Which means that, to win, we need to find other manpower.
And that means Iraqis, of our choosing.
Kurds are easy, and Kurdistan is not a problem. It's stable and able to defend itself.
The South is a mess, but we can have a great big, bad, violent and abusive Iraqi army there if we want one. We just need to get out of the way and let it go after the Sunnis, who are still the ones planting the IEDs blowing up OUR guys.
It means ethnic cleansing and a lot of dead people.
But at the end of it, it means that bad guys beholden to US will rule the roost in the South, as opposed to bad guys in the Sunni jihad, or bad guys aligned with Teheran.
Of course doing it this way means signing the death warrant for tens, or hundreds, of thousands of innocents. But that's what going to war in Iraq ALWAYS meant. We were only fooling ourselves that it didn't.
In the aftermath, a sprawling, corrupt, Arabist Shi'ite state with a war recivil war record as bloody as Saddam's, will be in power in the South, and at war with Syria and Iran, and a Kurdish entity will be in power in the North. Both will be beholden to us.
That is a victory.
It requires us to fully embrace the evil of a regime that, to win, will commit ethnic cleansing of Sunnis in the South. These Sunnis are our enemies, and the enemies of everything we stand for in the Middle East. We keep foolishly pretending that they don't have to be.
They are, and they DO have to be, and we're going to retreat in defeat and hand the place over to the pro-Iranian Shi'a (who will ALSO carry out the ethnic cleansing, but without our arms and money). Which will be a disaster.
We can win.
Our grandchildren will wring their hands about how evil we were, about how we "became as bad as our enemies", etc. And they will be right.
But we will have WON, and that's what I care about HERE and NOW. The echoes of that evil are for future generations to sob over. Right now, I want victory.
We were once willing to inflict this sort of desolation on other AMERICANS (voir: Sherman's March), but our leadership are now such a bunch of pansies that they will not do what has to be done to WIN.
Or we can do anything else, anything at all, and lose.
Bush won't embrace the evil option. He has been recommended it more than once, and he has publicly said "No". So instead the MORE evil option will be the outcome: which is that really bad guys still win, still butcher their foes AND they're our enemies too.
We can't do it with our army. We can still do it using Iraqis. Bush says no. Unless he changes his mind, we're dead.
You need to measure that in months joesbucks not years, when you consider attacks on US interests abroad during that time period. Thankfully we don't have to say the same since 9-11. And had the millenium bomber not been stopped by an alert border agent, we'd have seen something actually on American soil 18 months before we did. The Cole, the embassy etc...these are attacks we know about, other attack attempts that failed may also have occured. One can add in OKC and TWA 800 if you tend to believe eyewitness reports rather than official government positions, but I digress.
I continue to suspect Hussein was indeed sedated. Or in some way rendered unable to protest or resist during the clip of his noosing that's been circulated. I have no proof, of course, but neither do you. But then I also suspect Martha Stewart was on heavy Xanax when her verdict was read too. It's a common practice when tv cameras are sure to be focused.
Thank you for your many positive posts.
It is nice to see others who have not surrendered.
I would almost bet that most military families would much rather have their sons and daughters fighting in a war as if we were there to win it. We should have learned from Vietnam that pacification and winning the hearts and minds of the people has little reward. The only thing that the Arabs and insurgents respect is overwhelming force.
Yeah, it's the sum total of all the deaths that were propped up against us leaving Vietnam. Includes the 2.5 million under Pol Pot and others in the area, including Vietnam itself. I got the number from one of the foundations that did a report, forget which right now, but remembered the number. O'Rielly referenced it a few nights back, when he had a talking points memo on the real cost of the Vietnam pullout.
What is YOUR strategy? Please provide it with details.
If you use the comparrison of global attacks, then you would have to consider the daily attacks upon our people serving in Iraq.
The terrorists seem to have the ability to lay low and attack at the most opportune time. They are patient. Think of the efforts we have taken and implemented since 9/11 that certainly would have slowed the domestic opportunity for terrorism. Even so, the administration has admitted that we are still highly at risk domestically. If the Islamofacists were busy on the Iraqi front, then our risk would be much diminished, not still high. It has nothing to do with the terrorists pre-occupation in Iraq. It has to do with timing on their part.
Attacks on our troops during a time of war are hardly unexpected so your reasoning is flawed yet again. What you SHOULD be counting and remembering are the daily attacks on American and British planes in the no-fly zone for what...3 years? More maybe. And let's see just who WAS the POTUS during those years??....Why, I seem to recall it was BJ Clintoon himself. Filanderer in Chief.
If the Islamofacists were busy on the Iraqi front, then our risk would be much diminished, not still high.
Unfortunatley all the Islamofascists aren't in Iraq. But a whole $hitload are and we are making hamburger out of many of them whether you want to admit it or not.
"...It's time we recognized the nature of the conflict. It's total war and we are all involved. Nobody on our side is exempted because of age, gender, or handicap. The Islamofacists have stolen childhood from the world." [FReeper Retief]
"...That the totalitarian force pitted against freedom wears a religious makes this civil war among mankind all the more difficult to engage. Loving freedom as we do, it seems reprehensible to deliberate against a religion. But this is no ordinary religion as it demands absolute obedience of all to their religion at the cost of freedom itself." [FReeper Backtothestreets]
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U.S. must be stronger, not weaker, in Iraq
It is not possible for the United States to avoid involvement in this struggle. While Americans see the Iraq war mainly through the prism of partisan politics, the stakes go beyond the issue of Bush’s place in history. When this president’s term is completed, the problems he faced will remain, and history will also judge those who come after.
There's no escape.
;-)
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