Posted on 09/20/2003 9:13:01 AM PDT by Ex-Dem
If the world’s greatest newspaper says it, well, by all means, it must be true: “Across the U.S., Concern Grows About the Course of the War in Iraq.”
The New York Times, of course, would never dream of publishing fiction, or of distorting reality to advance the paper’s political agenda, So we will take the Times headline at face value and accept the premise that Americans are concerned about their country’s role in postwar Iraq.
They have a right to be concerned. More U.S. soldiers have died since the end of formal combat operations than were killed in the actual war that drove Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein out of power and into hiding. And there’s more: President Bush wants $87 billion to bankroll the rebuilding of Iraq and pay for ongoing military operations.
What started out as a barely-break-a-sweat walkover by U.S. troops has turned into a messy guerilla conflict pitting our soldiers against not only homegrown Iraqi terrorists but also interlopers from neighboring outposts. There is every reason to believe that it will get worse before it gets better.
Yes, the American people are concerned. But that doesn’t mean we want to bail out. It doesn’t mean we want to throw in the towel on an undertaking that figures to make the world a safer place, if only we are willing to see it through.
The Times went out and interviewed some people who might be described — by a liberal East Coast newspaper, at least — as “just plain folks.” Not surprisingly, the interviews produced several comments along the lines of this one by a resident of Illinois: “I think it’s going to go on forever. The U.S. opened a can of worms that should have never been opened in the first place.”
A woman from Nebraska called the conflict in Iraq “a real big waste of money.”
And a former Marine who told The Times he served in Vietnam predicted a quagmire in Iraq just like the one that brought the U.S. to its knees in Southeast Asia in the 1960s and ’70s.
“It’s a disaster,” said the California resident. “It will get worse and worse and we will leave the same way we left Vietnam: with our tail between our legs.”
Lots of anti-war types, Democratic presidential candidates and run-of-the-mill Bush-haters have been embracing the Iraq-Vietnam analogy, though the conflicts have little in common except the involvement of American soldiers.
A more relevant comparison would be Somalia, where U.S. troops attempted to engage in “nation-building” while surrounded by freelance enemies who wanted no part of nation-building.
In South Vietnam, the U.S. was trying to prevent a country from being taken over by invading forces. In Iraq, the country has already been taken over — by us. The question is: Now that we’ve taken it over, what the heck are we gonna do with it?
The U.S. has vital interests in Iraq that we never had in Somalia — or in Vietnam, for that matter. The Middle East is the boiling cauldron of global turmoil that Southeast Asia may have seemed to be 40 years ago, but really wasn’t. If ever there could be a place in the world other than our homeland where Americans can say that our survival is at stake, the Middle East is that place.
It’s why the Iraq war was worth pursuing. It’s why the U.S.-hating Saddam Hussein posed a constant threat that had to be confronted. The Middle East is the breeding ground and hiding place for the religious fanatics and political malcontents whose reason for living is to kill Americans.
Bush and his advisers are being criticized and ridiculed for “inadvertently” fueling terrorism in Iraq. But inadvertent or not, the U.S. has accomplished a useful goal: By conquering and liberating Iraq, Bush has effectively made that country the epicenter of the war against terrorism. Terrorists from throughout the region have migrated to Iraq to join the guerilla campaign against the hated Americans and their coalition partners.
Think about it, folks. Every terrorist who is fighting American soldiers in Iraq is a terrorist who is not attacking civilians in America. We can’t keep them all busy in Baghdad, but every little bit helps.
That’s the short term. The long-term value of our involvement in Iraq is the opportunity to establish a free and democratic nation in the heart of one of the most anti-democratic chunks of real estate since the Iron Curtain cast its tyrannical shadow over Eastern Europe. If democracy begins to catch on in the Middle East, the terrorists who breed and thrive there might suddenly find themselves homeless.
Maybe the task will prove too difficult, too expensive, too dangerous. Maybe, in the end, we’ll decide to give up and come home. But now? Just a few months into the effort?
I’ll buy the premise that Americans are concerned about what’s happening in Iraq. I absolutely refuse to believe that citizens of the greatest nation on earth — citizens of the nation that won two world wars — are ready to abandon a quest that has barely begun.
This is the key point! It's why we need to stay in Iraq and make it work as a democracy.
I take it that you disagree with my statement that politicians were responsible for the "Vietnam Quagmire." You should realize that General Westmoreland was very much in the political camp of the politicians running the show. Specifically Robert McNamara was the guy responsible for so much of the idiocy that went on there.
You should read McNamara's book In Retrospect. You will see the recurrent theme in his book that said, in order to end the war the US Military had to convince the VC and the NVA that "victory was impossible."
Any General who did not go along with this stupid idea would have been replaced - including Westmoreland. I would like to believe that he went along with it because he valued his career. But I really don't know. Maybe he simply believed that the strategy would win the war. He was wrong and the Johnson Administration was wrong in just about everything they did.
But make no mistake about it. Democrat Politics were responsible for the Vietnam "Quagmire."
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