If it seems like only yesterday, it was. And it’s continuing
today. Before the Iraq campaign, the media libs were warning that
if we didn’t give the U.N. more time, we’d be perceived as outlaws
if we took military action to rid ourselves of the threat of
Saddam’s regime. Shortly after military action began — when our
forces were winning so quickly, they had to stop for a couple of
days to catch up with themselves — our betters informed us we were
in a quagmire, that Iraq was a sandy version of Vietnam. When
Saddam’s statue was thrown over in downtown Baghdad, the media
itself had to take an operational pause. But not for long.
As weeks passed, and our inability to find Saddam’s weapons of
mass destruction became more puzzling, we were treated to the
“false war” campaign, which continues even now. But even if we find
the WMD, those — such as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. — will still
shout about the “falsified” and “politically-motivated” and
re-written intelligence reports that were used to create a
casus belli. As Schlesinger made clear in a Saturday
column in the Washington Post, that argument will be heard
until we find enormous amounts of WMD, and prove that they were
“deployed” for immediate use. He wrote, “Unearthing buried WMD
would not establish Iraq as a clear and present danger to the
United States. Deployment of WMD would have come much closer to
convincing people that Iraq was a mortal threat.” Closer, but still
not sufficient. Nothing will be sufficient to satisfy the Dems and
the media. They need to delegitimize the Iraq campaign, for to do
so is their only means to defeat Mr. Bush next year.
And that, after all, is what it’s all about. As Seattle
congressman “Baghdad Jim” McDermott said last week, the Dems are
planning to make the “false war” — and failure to find WMD —
their Numero Uno argument against Mr. Bush next year. It won’t
work. Americans support military action in Iraq — and anywhere
else terrorists are found — by a substantial margin. But for the
Dems, especially Howard Dean (the “maple-flavored McGovern,” as
Larry Sabato called him) it’s still 1968. And we’re back to the “Q”
word, which will be their campaign slogan for ‘04. Last Friday
night, Gunga Dan Rather previewed the case against the continued
involvement of American forces in Iraq. It’s the beginning of the
drumbeat to withdraw from Iraq before we should, just as these very
same media mentionables led us to do in Vietnam. They were wrong
then, and they are wrong now, but for very different reasons.
We crept into Vietnam gradually, and crept out with our tail
between our legs. From Harry Truman’s presidency to John Kennedy’s,
we gradually increased our presence in a land half a world away,
where our interests were not clear to Americans. Johnson set our
path to defeat, and Nixon didn’t have the courage or political
capital to face it and win.
Vietnam really wasn’t an American war. This one is. Sending
young Americans to die in Southeast Asia to prevent some dominos
from falling isn’t comparable to sending them to destroy terrorists
and the regimes that sponsor them. If the North Vietnamese had
sponsored a 9-11 against America, can anyone doubt that Ho Chi Minh
would have been killed or forced to flee into China? Gunga Dan
Rather and is pals want to turn America’s mood back to what it was
thirty-five years ago, forcing another scene like the indelible
image of the last helo out of Saigon. Withdrawal from Vietnam
certainly left the South Vietnamese in slavery, and left the field
open for Pol Pot’s genocide. This is different. If we withdraw from
Iraq before it is a stable democracy — whether it’s this year or
2103 — will allow our enemies to create another Iran or Saudi
Arabia to sponsor terrorism against us.
Gunga Dan and the others are now pressing the case that the
extended terms our troops are serving in Iraq is taking a terrible
toll on them, their families, and their mission. As to the first
two, they’re right.
Most of the men and women serving in Iraq have already been
there for months, and have been away from their homes and families
for much longer. It is a strain on them, and the sacrifices they
are making are anything but trivial. About sixty-one Americans have
been killed there since the military operations ended about two
months ago. Our troops can’t safely go to an open-air market.
Terrorists and remnants of the Baathist Saddamites are there in
force. Serving away from home is rarely easy, and having fought a
war and then been asked to keep the peace where there isn’t any,
the pressure on them is enormous. If they come to believe they are
doing something useless or impossible, even the best soldiers —
which ours and our Coalition partners are — can lose heart.
They inevitably lose heart when they lose the trust they have
for their leaders, and believe the people at home don’t support
them. Neither of those events is likely to occur in this
presidency. The emotional costs to our troops and their families of
their extended time in Iraq cannot be ignored. We must do
everything we can to lessen that cost, except bring them home. To
hint that we should withdraw them before the job is done because of
those costs is to do them — and our nation — a great injustice.
Have you heard the term “Iraqization” yet? If you haven’t, you will
soon.
Vietnamization failed for many reasons. First among them is that
Uncle Ho understood us better than we understood ourselves. He knew
he could patiently outwait us, and that with the calls for
cessation of assistance to South Vietnam, we’d go home eventually.
Whatever we did with the South Vietnamese, they were less dedicated
to keeping themselves free than the North was to enslaving them.
Iraqization can and will succeed if we don’t talk about withdrawal,
and invest whatever it takes, for however long it takes. American
forces need to be in Iraq long enough to prevent a radical
theocracy — or some other despotism — from taking hold.
We also need to quit thinking we’re so damned smart. The State
Department and CIA still think they’re smarter than Caesar and
Clive of India combined. Paul Bremer and the rest are failing in
one of their principal duties, turning Iraq over to the Iraqis. The
president needs to direct them to stop pussyfooting around and get
on with it. While they do that, we need to accelerate the
establishment of a provisional government there, something we
should have done months ago.
The next time you hear the media ask, “why are we still in
Iraq?” think how the Middle East looked two years ago. Think about
the Taliban, Saddam, and the others who we have fought, and those
sponsors of terror who we will have to fight sooner or later. For
most of us, the question answers itself. But not for people like
the maple-flavored McGovern, or Gunga Dan.
