June 29, 2005
Stay the Course
President Bush reiterated that "we will stay the course" in Iraq in his speech last night. I'm glad that he shows stern resolve in the face of repeated calls for "timelines,goal markers, and exit stragedies".
The Left is constantly trying to compare Iraq to Viet Nam as a "quagmire" without having learned the OTHER lessons of Viet Nam, namely, that you don't tell your enemy your limits; and that a military conflict can be won in the press if you can't beat your opponent by force of arms.
We can not tell the insurgents that if only they can hold on until _put date here_, they will have succeeeded in defeating the best army in the world. That is exactly what a timetable for withdrawal does. The one-sided reporting occurring at the moment in terms of only showing body counts of Coallition troops and Iraqi civilians without showing the real progress that has been made in terms of reconstruction and implementation of a new independant government is exactly what turned the people against the troops in Viet Nam and cost us the war after we had decimated the NVA to the point of almost non-existance.
Another thing that the doom and gloomers always attempt to say is that "Irag has nothing to do with the WoT". Well, if not, who are these "insurgents" that we're fighting in Iraq? MOST of the leadership of the "rebels" are NOT Iraqi, and if the reports are accurate, more and more of the fighters aren't either.
So WHERE would you rather fight them, in Iraq or here? And make no mistake, we will be fighting these people for longer than just in Iraq, but the fact is that they are fighting us in OUR choice of location, and they are obliging by coming to us to fight, and not staging more attacks on our own soil. This is a somewhat "cruel and heartless" way of looking at the situation, at least for the Iraqi nation; but then again, I am an AMERICAN , not an Iraqi, and prefer not to fight on my home soil. The Islamofacists declared this war over 20 years ago; for the most part, we weren't even aware that this war was declared untill 9/11. I thank god that we had a president that had the resolve to engage the enemy with real force rather than just trying to engage warriors with diplomats and cash bribes in the form of "aid".
It's a shame that the Iraqi people have to suffer the ravages of war, but the Islamofacists have to be fought somewhere, and it's the bad luck of the draw for the Iraqi's that the battlefield is centered there for the moment.
update: Sir George explains the folly of trying to fight a long term war on a timetable basis better than I could. As he said there is only one term for the side that tries to do so....The LOSER.