Iran War

"Tonight the President didn’t give us a plan to end the war or a justification for continuing the war.", so said Edwards in the Democrat rebuttal to a sitting wartime President’s call for unity and fortitude in defending our allies in Iraq. First let me quote someone far wiser than me, Machiavelli:

Wars begin where you will, but they do not end where you please.

Nor when you please. You can certainly pull out of Iraq but the war will continue and because a huge victory will be granted to our enemies it will expand. Maybe to our front door. Machiavelli again:

The Romans never allowed a trouble spot to remain simply to avoid going to war over it, because they knew that wars don't just go away, they are only postponed to someone else's advantage.

In this case ours. Like it or not we are the new Rome and Pax Americana falls on us. There can only be two results from a premature pullout, the country erupts into full scale civil or Iran quickly gains control through Sadr. There will be no civil war because as Steve Schippert explained back in May, the antagonists are Al Qaeda and Sadr, both backed by Iran. Al Qaeda, with full Iranian support, will move the front elsewhere as men and material will no longer be needed in what they themselves admitted was the main theater of operations against America. Iraq may for a time become more peaceful, except for those who trusted and helped us. Another quote you’ve all heard, at least in part, by George Santayana:

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Another quote, this time from our Commander in Chief.

In 1972, one anti-war senator put it this way: "What earthly difference does it make to nomadic tribes or uneducated, subsistence farmers in Vietnam or Cambodia or Laos whether they have a military dictator, a royal prince or a socialist commissar in some distant capital that they've never seen and they never heard of?" A columnist for The New York Times wrote in a similar vein in 1975, just as Cambodia and Vietnam were falling to the communists. "It's difficult to imagine," he said, "how their lives could be anything but better with the Americans gone." The headline of that story dated "Phnom Phen," summed up the argument: "Indochina without Americans: For most, a better life." The world would learn just how costly these misimpressions would be.

Steve Schippert also asked back in May in an open letter to Democrats this:

As members of the party that is constantly reminding America of the superiority of its members' compassion, I find it personally curious that none such seems to exist for the Iraqi people. How else can your readiness, nay impatience, for a withdrawal of United States military forces from their country be explained?

Though I was a Marine deployed in the Gulf War, I did not fully understand the 'geopolitics' then. Yet, since 1991, I have quietly borne the internal burden of conscience when our leadership abandon the Shi'a of southern Iraq after inspiring them into a rebellion and guaranteeing their protection. That burden was magnified over a decade later when the mass graves were unearthed after the fall of Saddam. What I knew in my heart was confirmed through my eyes. Driven largely by the weight of that burden of conscience, I understand fully today.

Just as I understand that the pursuit of the 'status quo' was a dishonorable geopolitical aim in 1991, I also understand that abandoning Iraqis with ruthless terrorists in their midst in pursuit of "counterterrorism" is beyond dishonorable. It is, in fact, incredulous.

Please read the whole letter.



One last thing. No one mentions the Kurds. Iranian Kurds can tell you the Persians are not their friends. Atlas Shrugs has some graphic pictures of the atrocities the Mullahs have inflicting on Kurdish children! Neither Sunni nor Shia have been kind to the Kurds either. Should we turn over Iraq to Iran and Sadr what happens to Kurdistan, northern Iraq? There is no civil war there, they love Bush and America, in fact you would be hard put to find a better ally in the whole region. Will we at least stay and protect them or will Kurdistan become the next killing fields?