Posted on 09/11/2006 6:08:08 PM PDT by meandog
What If We Left?
By William F. Buckley Jr.
The wires are heavy with the question of Iraq. The defeat of Senator Lieberman in the Democratic primary in Connecticut was a call to outright defiance by Democrats running for reelection. They have been warned now, by the unforgiving, that they must reject the war in Iraq and labor with the single end in mind of returning American troops and dissolving U.S. commitments.
Arguments are made for staying in and completing the mission. Norman Podhoretz, writing in the Wall Street Journal, does his illuminating best to make the case. National Review posts a symposium giving the views of a half dozen students of the contest.
The Weekly Standard publishes a robust defense of the Iraq venture written by William J. Stuntz, who is a professor at the Harvard Law School. He reminds his readers that in 1968 Eugene McCarthy practically defeated incumbent president Lyndon Johnson in the New Hampshire primary, bringing on the end of his presidency.
"On any plausible scale of strategic value," Professor Stuntz writes, "Iraq today easily beats Vietnam in the late 1960s or Korea in the early 1950s. America has three enemies in the Middle East today: secular or Sunni Baathism, violent Sunni jihadism, and violent Shiite jihadism. . . . All three are dangerous because all have imperial ambitions; each seeks not control of a small piece of Middle Eastern real estate but regional hegemony—even, in the case of the jihadists, world domination. Needless to say, all three hate the West."
The moral argument can't be conclusive, and nobody is arguing that it should be thought so. But it isn't right to ignore it. Here is how it figured in another context.
"I am convinced that [ours] is one of the most unjust wars that has ever been fought in the history of the world. Our involvement . . . has torn up the Geneva Accord. It has strengthened the military industrial complex; it has strengthened the forces of reaction in our nation. It has put us against the self-determination of a vast majority of the [native] people, and put us in the position of protecting a corrupt regime that is stacked against the poor. It has played havoc with our domestic destinies.
We are spending five hundred thousand dollars to kill every [enemy] soldier. Every time we kill one we spend about five hundred thousand dollars, while we spend only fifty-three dollars a year for every person characterized as poverty-stricken in the so-called poverty program, which is not even a good skirmish against poverty.
"Not only that, it has put us in a position of appearing to the world as an arrogant nation. And here we are ten thousand miles away from home, fighting for the so-called freedom of the [native] people, when we have not even put our own house in order. The judgment of God is upon us today. And we could go right down the line and see that something must be done—and something must be done quickly. We have alienated ourselves from other nations so we end up morally and politically isolated in the world. There is not a single major ally of the United States of America that would dare send a troop to—
"Vietnam."
That was a speech by Martin Luther King Jr. Four days later, he was slaughtered in Memphis.
Dr. King did not live to see the day, five years later, when the United States pulled out from Vietnam the last of our flags. That was in 1973. And he did not live to see the day, two years later, when Saigon fell and the Communist victors killed hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese and forced more than 1.5 million into re-education camps, causing 2 million others to flee Vietnam.
Lawrence Kaplan is a senior editor of The New Republic. He wrote last week, "U.S. troops are the only thing standing between what we see on our television sets today and butchery on a scale that would rival the worst of Saddam Hussein's depredations." Good men will perhaps not be finally governed by consideration of the
And one at home: Liberals.
What is going on now is a holding operation. That's why it doesn't look like we are "fighting to win", because no actual military objectives remain to be taken. We already have them.
Seeing now that our President keeps calling the enemy "radicals" and keeps praising Islam, we are in a mess.
P.S. The real question here is why so much neverending whining has issued for 3+ years from people 99+% of whose the invasion/occupation in Iraq has not affected in the slightest. Mr. F. Buckley included.
Exactly. This supposed widespread dissatisfaction with the Iraq war is, in my opinion, largely a creation of the leftist, hate Bush media, "proven" by push polls and biased reporting. It's like the "sky high" gas prices I keep hearing about, while prices I pay at the pump have been falling for nearly a month. US casualties have been going down for several months.
Is he doing a "Goldwater"?
Buckley is done. He's one of my three picks in a Celebrity Death Pool.
" And one at home: Liberals."
The worst of the bunch!!
There is a program called adopt-a-soldier which needs desperately to have common people volunteers to make repeated and continuous connection with brave soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, and send small tokens of comfort like new socks or underwear, for men and women killing the terrorists over there, to prevent these same murderous bastards from taking control of the Middle East. These brave soldiers and sailors have families who are sometimes in need of help back home. We the people had better get going to help their families, to relieve the mental burdens from men and women risking their lives to secure our freedom and future safety from radical islamism. Get involved with the adopted-a-soldier program and find out how you may help on a personal level, to win this most grave war we cannot afford to lose.
And make no mistake, if we pull out without establishing a lasting peace in Iraq, the entire Middle East will fall to the islamofascists just as bin Laden and fifteen other islamofascist organizations in the Middle East have been planning, ending Western peace and advancement now based on oil.
Do we think democrats understand this urgency? HAH! Even Buckley can't get his once formidable mind around it! With democrats, there is no way they can allow themselves to see this truth because they and their sycophantic bastards in the media have invested so much in trying to accomplish the failure of the Bush doctrine of establishing democracies in the Middle East ... as the democrat party empowerment scheme they work to make it fail. This election cycle is crucial to our brave military and the future of Western peace in the future of our children. And if conservatives succeed in keeping the democrat's leftist agenda from taking back control, the day after the election results are announced, we need to storm the halls of Congress to demand that these deaf Republican fools get about closing the borders and increasing the support of our courageous troops to win the peace in Iraq by knowing the nation is rejecting the leftist bastards and uniting to succeed instead of empower the leftist democrat cesspool of appeasement and deadly talk talk talk. Unless we become united again, we will lose the Middle East to radical islamism.
Well said!
This is the part that Leftists conveniently leave out when they cheer the US leaving Vietnam. They also leave out how the Democrat congress, giddy with outsting Nixon and taking control of Congress, cut off funding for the right-wing military government of Cambodia to let the communist Khmer Rouge take over, too. Yeah, that's the blood of another two million people on their hands. But what's a little blood when your intentions are noble, right?
Ask the Democrat politicians if they're running on a platform of restoring Saddam to power and, if elected, will they.
We are fighting. We are training iraqi fighters, and contrary to your misinformation, we are winning handily.
Good grief, you are so woefully uninformed it hurts.
If we leave, the Democratic Iraqi government falls, the purge of any and all persons who supported democracy will begin before our soldiers and Marines boot prints in the sand have faded. Men, women, children, tens of thousands or more will be slaughtered by the terrorists, and I wonder how long it would take before Hussein would take control again, supported by Al Qaeda and Islamic Jihad and the other terrorist groups in Iraq.
The terrorists in Iraq, after completing the purge of democratic supporters, will go to Afghanistan or anywhere else our military has gone to from Iraq, and start fighting us there just like in Iraq, and we'll still be taking the same or more casualties, and will have sacrificed a new democracy and abandoned the Iraqi people for the SECOND time in 15 years.
The terrorists would take our withdrawal in Iraq as a victory and say it's proof that America is weak and can be beaten. Liberals think that our being in Iraq creates terrorists. How many terrorists will be created when we tuck tail and run from Iraq and the terrorists organizations of the world herald that as a recruiting poster. Afghanistan will be toast because all the terrorist pressure of the world will then be directed to taking back Afghanistan, and with no coast line, naval support will be negated. Iran will pour tons of materials into Afghanistan that it had been sending to Iraq, and we will not be able to check it. Afghanistan, having more rugged terrain, more ground, hotter summers, colder winters, and a more porous border will fall, and then when we run from there, where will they strike us next? Kuwait, Saudi Arabia? Egypt? Might as well just pull our whole military out of the Middle East, fortify our borders, and get ready for $5 per gallon oil, because that's what we'll get when the terrorists have that much say in OPEC prices.
And then finally, when it's all over, and the terrorists strike the U.S., free from having to use resources to engage us over seas in a nation in the region, and they'll hit the U.S., or England, or Australia, or some other close ally, but likely America, either with chem, bio, or nuclear weapons, either missile delivered or portable device on a ship or vehicle, and then, we can start from scratch, deciding to go back into Afghanistan or some other nation that is the primary target, maybe Iran this time, from scratch, with no foothold, no beachhead, no allies in the country, losing thousands just to establish a foothold and then, if anyone wants to see a quagmire, look what it will be like if we go into a country like this from scratch, fighting against emboldened terrorists, with high morale and boosted numbers fresh from defeating us in Iraq and Afghanistan. And then the Democrats can support it for a few weeks, and then demand we pull out of there, having had sacrificed even more military heroes in another premature aborted war because Democrats don't have the stomach to win. THAT is the price for pulling out of Iraq.
That's the bottom line of all this. There have been approximately 2.4 troops lost per day in Iraq since the start of the war in March of 2003. That's compared to and average 16 per day in Vietnam, and over 50 per day in Korea and WWII. By any objective evaluation, the number of people we've lost in Iraq is miraculously low, and all the talk of the death toll demonstrates a deliberate ignorance of past wars. Well, that's it. That's my take on what it would be like if we leave Iraq. It very well could be the first domino to fall that leads to the end of free democratic western civilization as we know it, leaving our grandchildren living in a much darker, more evil, more dangerous world that more resembles the 11th century then the 21st century.
Winning in Iraq means democracy can succeed in Middle Eastern nations, terrorism will wither and die a slow painful death with every new democracy. No democratic nation has EVER attacked another EVER. Democracy spurs free trade and free economies, and is a cancer when it comes to radical fascist Islam, which can't survive and find recruits in a free nation with opportunity and liberty. Free people do not want to kill themselves or others. Democracy is the bane to terrorism. These are just facts of the matters at hand. So there are two choices, win or lose. Win if we stay in Iraq and win, spreading Democracy to ALL people of the world, or lose in Iraq, and lose the war on terror and cede the world to radical Fascist Islam, which will consume it like a cancer. These aren't radical assessments. They are logical rational lines of progression which WILL follow each other depending on which path America takes. We win and live free, or lose and live as Islamic slaves or die.
I say, live free or die. Better to die a free man then live as a slave. F**k the fascist terrorists. They want death, give it to them till there are none left to take anymore. So say I.
Outstanding Texas....I agree with every point you have made, because it is common sense.
Running away from this fight, a fight in which we have killed so many terrorists, would haunt this nation for a century, if not destroy it outright. Liberty or death is not just a catch phrase.
Thanks for the post and the ping.
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What if we left ..Vietnam..?
Pictures of a vietnamese Re-Education Camp
http://www.Freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1692140/posts
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Thanks. I hope no one minds the ping. It just struck me as a really important threat. This argument is really under discussed I think, and it's always beaten in the media, but they never take it down the road of course, just talk about if we should get out, never talking about what would happen if we do. Annoying. Foresight seems to be an ever rarer trait in many people. Another big flaw in our "minute rice" society. Now now now, don't care about later.
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