Road Ahead in Iraq
No Cutting and Running
By D.W.

Let’s be honest, whether or not the invasion of Iraq was justified or not is irrelevant to current policy and political decisions. Right now we are there and we are heavily engaged so we need to win and stop at nothing short of it. Therefore it is time to leave the second guessing of Bush’s decision to historians, especially years from now when the results of the invasion are manifest. The Iraq war may not turn out the way we had planned but we can still achieve quite a bit of success if we make the right decisions now.

However, if you buy into kooky liberal conspiracy theories about the invasion being a Halliburton scam for oil then you are a moron beyond all hope. The President did what he thought was right with the information he had at the time. In retrospect, he did make some mistakes but nothing is ever guaranteed in war as it is a human event. You can predict possible outcomes to a high degree of certainty if you have a lot of accurate data available. However, the human factor always kicks in complicating these nice mathematical models.

Simply put, war is not a chess game and it never will be because the pawns don’t always move where you want them to.
 

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So far we have lost 3,000 soldiers and I knew a few of them personally. Every soldier and marine lost is a tragedy for the family and the nation. However, I don’t want to seem grim and dispassionate but looking at this objectively, in less than five years of fighting we really haven’t lost that many troops. Keeping things in perspective we are not suffering a lot of casualties despite how gruesome the media makes it sound (some of our own cities have plenty of violent criminals roaming the streets).

During World War II, the U.S. lost 3,000 or more soldiers in a single day of fighting. In Vietnam there were probably months where we lost that and more. This war is not as bleak and gloomy as we are fooling ourselves into thinking it is.

The worst thing we can do is to pull out and allow Iraq to fall into chaos, which will benefit our enemies in Iran and elsewhere. An Iraq in chaos is far worse and far more threatening than an Iraq under Saddam. You may not want to hear that, but that is the way it is, so accept it. For some people, it is far more entertaining to think about the trials and tribulations of Britney Spears running around without any panties than it is to worry about people who want to kill you. However, tuning the problem out won’t make it go away.

One thing history tells us is that there is nothing certain in war. War is and will always be a human activity and humans are not robots. Human actions can’t be completely understood through mathematical equations. Either side in a conflict can carry the day and be victorious, even if the odds are against them.

What would have happened if Hitler had liberated the Ukrainians from Soviet rule during the Second World War instead of trying to annihilate them? He probably would have fielded a massive Ukrainian army full of hatred for Stalin who had killed millions of them during the various purges.

The outcome of the Vietnam War wasn’t inevitable either, we could have won and the South could still exist. What if LBJ had blown the Red River Dykes, mined Hyphong Harbor, and firebombed every major military installation in North Vietnam at the beginning of the war? Every person and nation has its breaking point and I am pretty sure the North Vietnamese would have reached theirs.

Neither victory nor defeat in Iraq is inevitable at this point in history.

This is going to be a long and ugly conflict. There will be a lot more deaths and violence but with the right tactics and strategy on all levels from the military to the political components, it can be done. Iraq will never be perfect and it will be a very long time before it resembles anything like a Western state. However, Rwanda managed to rise from genocide and Bosnia is recovering from a far worse conflict than what the Iraqi’s are facing.

So enough with the self-defeating doom and gloom!

The crybabies from the X and Y generation need to quit complaining and man up like your ancestors have done throughout American history. The Civil War, both World Wars, the Korean War, the Cold War, and the Great Depression presented far more difficult challenges than the one we face in Iraq. God forbid suicide bombers started targeting Starbucks across the country, the entire nation would be crippled without their lattes and the economy would surely collapse.

We must realize that if we want to live in a safer world that offers a better future for our grandchildren that we have to create it. Our grandfathers overcame Nazism and fascism and our fathers (not the hippie ones) stood down the global spread of communism. Isn’t the world a better place because of these victories? Could you even imagine a big war happening between European nations anymore? Although Russia is regressing into an authoritarian state, it will never again become the Soviet Union and threaten global peace as it once did.

If we want a Middle East free of terrorism and Islamic extremism then we have to create that future. It will be very difficult and very dangerous even without any more wars. We will fail often during our endeavor and suffer for our failures. But, it is a future we can work to create, if we are willing to sacrifice for it. However, nothing will happen if we give up in Iraq so easily.

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