American troops should stay in Iraq: Churchill's grandson

OTTAWA - The grandson of Sir Winston Churchill will tell an Ottawa audience today that an American withdrawal from Iraq would be disastrous for the Middle East and for Western nations.

That grandson, also named Winston Churchill, is scheduled to speak at the annual forum of Kollel of Ottawa, a centre for advanced Torah study.

"If the Americans admit failure and withdraw soon from Iraq, I see the writing on the wall," Churchill told CanWest News Service in a phone call from Britain. "Our friends and allies in the region, as well as nations throughout the Western world, including North America, will end up paying a terrible price."

People mistakenly equate an American exit from Iraq with the American withdrawal from Vietnam in 1975, he said.

He went on to say the insurgent forces, now fighting in Iraq, would "establish in that country the base that they've been denied in Afghanistan, with an additional advantage in having access to one of the largest oil reserves in the world, easily able to fund bigger and better acts of terror across the world."

Like his grandfather, Churchill has been both a politician and journalist. For 27 years, he was a British MP, and as a 26-year-old journalist, covered the Six Day War in which Israel defeated its Arab neighbours, Egypt, Jordan and Syria.

Though he believed that American forces must remain for the time being in Iraq, Churchill had severe criticisms of how the United States has conducted its war.

"The Bush administration certainly never had a coherent plan for what to do when they got to Baghdad, and a result have not had enough troops. And this is what has allowed the insurgency to get underway big time."

The real problem, he said, is that Western powers, whatever the strengths of their military arsenals, have allowed the number of soldiers in their armies to fall disastrously since the end of the Cold War.

He also criticized the disbanding of the Iraqi army and police forces, and the decision to deny all former members of the Baathist party any role in government.

Many members of the army and police forces were no doubt honest people, he said.

And the Baathist party, which governed Iraq under Saddam Hussein, included many of the most competent people in the country.

"If you look at the Iraq of Saddam Hussein, or the totalitarian regimes in Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, you see the same story repeatedly - it was impossible to get an education, become a teacher or doctor, have any real professional employment, without a party card.

"And to assume after the liberation of such countries that all those who carried a party card are one's enemy is incredibly naive and stupid."

Churchill did not want to give away all the points he intends to make in his speech, but he did have a piece of advice for the Americans: "Train your troops for peacekeeping work. Your army and marine corps are excellent at making war, but when it comes to running a peacekeeping operation, they are well below the level of events.

"That's something we Brits learned the hard way over 40 years in Northern Ireland. Ultimately, you only win when you get the civilian population overwhelmingly on your side."

I cant agree with his view on the Baathist party. He must be nuts thinking they could be good for a new Iraq. They a hude part of the problem including the Baath Party in Syria.

And yet nobody wants to mention the "D" word. We could mobilize our forces soon enough if we only had the will and were not afraid of the screams from the left.

And it sure wouldn't hurt some of these wusses on the left (and even some on the right) to put in a little time serving their country.

My favorite quote about the left and the Iraq War

“Here the country had finally given liberals a war against fundamentalism and they don’t want to fight it. They would have, except it would put them on the same side as the United States.” Ann Coulter-

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