TOM COTTON IN IRAQ
Posted on 05/21/2015 1:19:43 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Tom Cotton, the Iraq war veteran from Arkansas turned Republican senator, has a message to fellow soldiers: "We should not be ashamed of the war we conducted in Iraq."
Leading Republicans are sticking by the Iraq war, declining to follow the Democrats into full retreat and regret.
Cotton, while conceding that there are lessons to be learned from the conflict and that it might have been handled differently in retrospect, maintains that President George W. Bush made the best decision he could at the time based on the available intelligence about Saddam Hussein's presumed stockpile of weapons of mass destruction.
"Knowing what we know now, I absolutely would have sent the Pacific Fleet out of Pearl Harbor on Dec. 4 to intercept the Japanese Fleet," Cotton told the Washington Examiner during an interview in his Capitol Hill office.
"I say that to highlight how foolish the question is. You don't get to live life in reverse. What a leader has to do is make a decision, at the moment of decision, based on the best information he has. George Bush did that in 2002 and 2003 and he was supported by Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden and John Kerry and every western country's intelligence agency.
"There are lessons we can learn from the early days of the Iraq War. One is that we clearly should be more critically analytical about our approach to intelligence assesements" Cotton added.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonexaminer.com ...
Well said Senator.
Thank you for your service Tom
We have a battle tested and ready military. Just think what we’d have if we didn’t go to Iraq and Obama becomes president.
We won a war. Had we known that Obama would be elected and would pull our troops out, then maybe yes you could say it was not the right thing to do.
Actually, that’s an ISAF patch on his left shoulder indicating an Afghanistan tour. Didn’t know he was there also.
The only shame to be had belongs with the current White House.
As a retired Marine Corps officer and student of warfare, I have noticed a significant de-evolution in war, or more specifically, the aftermath of war.
1-Initially, war was punitive, meaning to punish a rival or refill ones coffers (or both).
2-Then came the nation building phase where groups banded together to protect themselves from marauders.
3-Then came national response to regional conflict such as WWI & WWII.
4-Followed by a return to a punitive or limited state of war (punish rouge states or prevent escalation) without vanquishing the enemy.
The aftermath of 1 was a devastated city state and the aggressor did little or nothing to rebuild the vanquished. This created hostilities that lasted for generations.
The aftermath of 2 was to increase the dependency of the confederated city states and create a nation. This created some of the greatest nations on Earth.
The aftermath of 3 was to rebuild the vanquished and create a stable government from the ashes. This created symbiotic alliances and relative peace.
The aftermath of 4 was to replace the regime. This created chaos.
God Bless Senator Tom Cotton! He is a Patriot! If only we had more like him in Congress.
Pfft. I am not ashamed of it. I fully stand by it as a US Citizen.
Liberals can pound sand. I hope they are ashamed of it, and the shame adds to their universal and perpetual angst about nearly anything.
Conservatives who disagree, well...I will agree to disagree with them. I think it was the right thing to do, and our troops did an unbelievably good job in tough circumstances.
Are there things we could have done better? Absolutely. Lots of things.
Amen to that! It's a a gotcha question based on an absurd premise.
Cong. Cotton's 'Pearl Harbor' response is the perfect rejoinder to it.
We won the war. We’re good at that. But we completely screwed up the peace and the nation-building in both cases. We hitched our wagon crooked leaders heading corrupt regimes and whose primary purpose was to line their pockets and who didn’t have the support of their people. Why should we send people back to fight and die in Iraq when their own army won’t?
I am beginning to love this guy. We have a growing young generation of very articulate, very principled leaders. Hopefully some of them survive the onslaught of the political elite and don’t get coopted or kicked out of office.
There were serious mistakes made in the execution, in the strategy (from the political leaders), and in the Rules of Engagement. The thing that is unquestionably worse than war is war you aren’t planning to win, and our strategy was not a strategy to win.
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