Posted on 05/25/2008 12:45:27 PM PDT by The_Republican
For the American Left, there are many reasons to withdraw from Iraq: we're caught in the middle of a sectarian civil war, the Iraqi government is a perfidious ally, Iraq is a diversion from the real war against al Qaeda in Afghanistan, and so on. Some of these arguments are strategically shortsighted, others are based on false premises (such as the fact that the sectarian civil war is over in Iraq and bin Laden is in Pakistan, not Afghanistan), but at least they are more or less logically coherent. What makes almost no sense is the proposal that we turn success in Iraq into defeat so that we can "fix the military."
Fixing the "broken" military is a reliable campaign talking point for both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama; the Democrats have embraced the idea that soldiers are a new constituency in their Coalition of the Victimized. Obama's victory speech after the South Carolina primary in January grouped soldiers and their families with "the mother who can't get Medicaid for her sick child," the "teacher who works another shift at Dunkin Donuts" and the "Maytag worker who is now competing with his own teenager for a $7-an-hour job at Walmart."
The fix-the-military argument was recently made at greater length by the New York Times. On May 18, the paper's editorialists noted that the efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan have taken a serious toll on the Army and Marine Corps, wearing down not only people but equipment "at an unprecedented rate." Well, the loss rates would not have been surprising to the defenders of Bastogne, the armies at Antietam, or the servicemen and women in any other major war, but it is true that US land forces have been asked to do too much with too little for too long.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
Yeah, the Democrats will fix the military. They’ll fix it good.
Well you do know that the Demoncrats always fix everything...so that it continually needs fixing with every increasing unneeded expenditures.
Bless their lil’ hearts, besides fixing the “broken” military, they want to fix the oil industry by nationalizing it too.
Either Clinton or Obama would “fix” the military, OK. They would gradually defund it, if only by such devises as Jim Webb proposes, which would over the course of time, create a force like the British military, which is slowly shriveling away. Withdrawal from the Middle East may soon be followed by withdrawal from East Asia.
Didn’t the military meet 140% of its recruiting goals last month?
How is that a broken military?
The more and more post-service “rights” we give “veterans”, the worse this will get. Every “vet” thirsty after special “rights” is another possible victim for the party of victimology.
And their families.
The Bush/Clinton/Bush experiments have been run long enough. Extended deployments of "National Guard" troops in combat roles on overseas adventures has gone on long enough to realize that there's a need to have a larger and better supported Active Duty component if we're going to be nation-building for years and policing for decades all over the world.
BTTT!
Tell you what Democrats. Each of you give up 10 earmarks for the Defense budget, then we will take your caterwauling seriously.
The chances that the People are going to allow that are near zero.
Don't you know, you not suppose to bother them with facts! They have their demagoguery and they are clinging to it. They cannot actually come up with a coherent sane Foreign Policy so they have to spew this nonsense so they can fool the voters into thinking they are "National Security Hawks".
The “fix” would be instituting the draft, and reducing the status of the now really well-trained and technologically superior fighting men to “grunts”, sent on patrols where they had no idea of objectives, inadequate strategies for defeating the enemy, and endless logistical difficulties once in the field. Inevitably, the numbers of soldiers killed or maimed in action would begin to resemble the figures from the Viet Nam conflict, the Korean conflict, even the invasion of Iwo Jima or Normandy. But wouldn’t the world remember these “glorious soldiers”, much as the “Greatest Generation” is now remembered, even as they are dying off from old age?
Democrats have no idea how or why war, any war, is fought.
I totally agree. I can't believe the number of vet who qualify for some sort of disability. I had a neighbor get 50 percent for a voluntary hysterectomy. I did my time and then did another quarter century. I was proud to serve and I didn't try to pull anything over on the VA. All I ask for is a small plot of land and a headstone when my time is up.
My recommendation for anyone in the military, should one of the wackjob Liberals get elected POTUS, is get out of the military at the first opportunity. Let Liberals start drafting their Liberal cohorts who are spineless, gutless, and have no gonads. Send them into battle with a case of white flags with Nancy Pelosi leading the charge as point witch. In fact, we won’t need a military, Liberals are going to cry and whine and talk our enemies vowing to destroy us out of being mean. Meanwhile, the rest of us can bend over and kiss our butts goodbye.
Some great points in the article from the Long War pov. That said, IMO we are going to have National Service to augment our globalist FP.
Love the name point witch for Pelosi. Right on
I’m not so sure. The people I talk to on a daily basis only seem vaguely aware of our troop deployments. And then of course there are those who will shout traitor at anybody who questions the wisdom of Empire.
The only reason, and I mean the ONLY reason we are in Iraq is because of 9/11. President Bush and his administration (contrary to what the moonbats think) did not just wake up one day and decide to go on a military adventure in Iraq because things were getting boring.
We didn’t go into Iraq to nation-build because we thought it would be a nice thing to do for the Iraqis and a good thing for President Bush to pump up his war fighting credentials before an election.
We did it because it was in OUR best interests to do it. Everyone forgets what the major threats were perceived to be BEFORE 9/11, and those threats were Al-Queda and Iraq. Look at the heat the administration took from the dorks who said they didn’t “connect the dots”. The same people screaming about us being in Iraq are the same people who screamed the loudest that GHW Bush dropped the ball by not going all the way to Baghdad.
On the day after 9/11, it was President Bush’s responsibility to address those threats in the light of what had happened.
We had 3000 of our fellow Americans brutally murdered in one horrible day, and all the rules changed.
The point is, we ARE nation building. The alternative after 9/11 was to bomb them into rubble and then bomb the rubble. That might make them hate and fear us, and to many people, including many on Free Republic, that is fine if they hate us as long as they fear us.
That is the viewpoint the Nazis had, and we are NOT the Nazis. We ARE different. The USA has done more good for more people on the face of the earth than any other country in history. We should be proud of it. We could be pumping the oil in Iraq under armed guard and shipping it to our refineries, but that is not why we are there, contrary to the heartfelt lunatic beliefs of many on the left.
So, yeah. This is an experiment, and it is costing us huge amounts of treasure along with the blood of many of our finest people. It may eventually fail, we might then have more 9/11s, and we can then bomb the Middle East into rubble and make them fear us more than they hate us.
But if it succeeds, a seed may be planted. IF they can learn to live together in Iraq without the iron hand of a dictator like Saddam Hussein, and IF they can find a way to distribute fairly the oil wealth of the country to ALL the citizens, and IF a free market economy can take root and flourish, the countries in that part of the world are going to look at Iraq and wonder why it cannot be them.
I believe firmly in the concepts outlined in Natan Sharansky’s book “The Case For Democracy”, and if given a chance, I think it can be borne out in Iraq, not to mention Afghanistan. Naive? No, just that there is plenty of time for the alternative, and the fact that I DO believe in the concept of American Exceptionalism, I think it is our responsibility to try.
A lot of people are happy to be able to go to work without the fear that a plane is going to get flown into the building they work in. They don’t give a damn that we have US military personnel deployed in something like 80 different countries and are all too happy to reap the benefit of unknown men willing and able to wreak havoc on bad guys without our knowledge, but want to take the moral or fiscal high ground and denounce that activity.
There is a price for safety after 9/11, and us having people deployed in places doing things we don’t know about and aren’t being publicized is a price we are paying.
The screaming will get loud enough, we are going to pull back to our borders, and then something worse than 9/11 is going to happen.
I can hear the people screaming now that their government didn’t do enough to protect them.
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