Please Freepmail me to be added to the Ollie North ping list.
Posted on 03/21/2013 9:01:56 AM PDT by jazusamo
WASHINGTON — It's the question asked by Gold Star families — the loved ones of our fallen — when I meet them at funerals or public events. It is spoken quietly by the spouses of grievously wounded soldiers, sailors, airmen, guardsmen and Marines when I visit military and veterans hospitals. And it's in the correspondence I receive from parents and friends of those who have left something on the battlefield: "Was it worth it?"
A decade ago this week, when Operation Iraqi Freedom began, this wasn't a question posed to our Fox News team. While cameras in Baghdad captured the "shock and awe" of precision-guided missiles and bombs hitting Saddam Hussein's capital, Griff Jenkins and I were embedded with U.S. Marine Medium Helicopter Squadron 268 and a battalion of Royal Marine commandos en route to the Faw Peninsula on the largest night helo-borne assault in history.
More than 50 U.S. and British helos took off from the tactical assembly area in Gibraltar and raced for the border at more than 100 knots, just 120 feet above the ground to avoid enemy radar. My night lens, pointed out over the .50-caliber machine gun, caught the blinding flash as the helicopter on our left side went down on the desert floor. There were no survivors. The seven British commandos and four U.S. Marines aboard were the first 11 of 4,804 coalition personnel — 4,486 of them Americans — killed during nine years of combat in Operation Iraqi Freedom.
By April 9, when we went with Marine Regimental Combat Team 5 into Baghdad, more than 350 Americans had been killed or wounded. Yet there was still an international and domestic consensus that coalition forces would capture Saddam Hussein — and his brutal sons, Uday and Qusay — and find the weapons...
(Excerpt) Read more at creators.com ...
Please Freepmail me to be added to the Ollie North ping list.
Isn’t it disrespectful to the fallen to ask “Was it worth it?” Perhaps I am old-fashioned in my thought.
That’s the question Ollie North and others have gotten from loved ones that were lost, for them I don’t believe it’s disrespectful.
argh
from those who lost loved ones
I can’t say what the fashion was in the old days but it’s never been smart to just take what your government tells you uncritically.
The next seven years after that? Not so much.
It would be disrespectful not to ask. The answer is, No, it was not worth it. It was never worth it. And I am so sorry for those who died or were injured, and for their families. You suffered for nothing.
This world is a vale of tears, because of human sin.
I met an Iraqi at work whose Basra based family was all killed, person by person, for different reasons, by Saddam over the years until he was the only one left after the invasion.
He was grateful that the U.S. overthrew Saddam and saved his country.
Saddam was murdering about 100,000 people per year during his regime. The total number of people killed after he was deposed never exceeded that number again, and is now down below 10,000 per year.
Literally hundreds of thousands, and maybe millions of people are now alive who would have been killed had Saddam continued in power.
Plus, the risk of leaving him there to do worse was unacceptable after 9/11.
So, I come down on the side of, “Yes, it was definitely worth it.” I count human souls as the measure of good and evil. Tossing Saddam saved so many, I have to call that good.
Yeah, muzzies. When does saving muzzies ever work out for those of us who live in the 21st Century?
That’s mighty Christian of you.
Thank you. And might I add, it's mighty muzzie of you.
Good luck with St. Peter.
I’m Jewish.
And yet here you are pretending to be the final word on what it is to be a Christian.
You could have said "How Jewish of you." - and then you would have at least had some credibility, but alas you sought to attack, not muzzies, but Christianity. Interesting.
I think you're a troll.
“I think you’re a troll.”
Sirius Lee
Since Feb 6, 2012
I think you support mass murder.
Uncle Miltie
Since Nov 25, 1999
We are war with islam. You have sided with the muzzies. You are the enemy.
Nachum, sir, what say you?
Do you find that I’m with the muzzies and I am the enemy, or is our dear Sirius Lee quite off his meds today?
;-)
I bet she tells you to stop hiding behind her skirt, muzzie-lover.
LOL. You’re a hoot. This is so much fun, I wouldn’t dare report you for abuse now! You can be our local curmudgeon. Which is kinda hard in this crowd, since most of us are in our own rights anyhow.
So, you’re superlative. Keep up the good work!
I think everyone is entitled to their opinion. In a long war, the suffering is horrible and I heard much the same during the Viet Nam war.
A lot of conservatives think that we should have prosecuted this war like Bush I and Clinton did. Go in, bomb a bunch of stuff and leave with fewer losses and lest cost.
Dore Gold writes that the West pretty much had little choice but to invade as Saddam was out of control and that Iraq was a base for world wide terror like Afghanistan. The cost has been horrible, but would we have suffered many more World Trade Center 9/11 bombings if we had not? No one knows and we we are left with a guerilla war without end. Probably, we will run away at some point, much like the British did in Iraq in the early 20th century. They got tired of being murdered a little at a time and saw no point in staying.
Some conspiracy people posit that The West used this invation to bring us a national police force in the TSA and DHS. That this war was an excuse to bring the proud free people of the U.S. low and make us more pliable like Europe.
That is my 2 cents.
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