What most America’s do not realize is that we actually won the war in Iraq. Sadaam was removed and brought to justice. A democratically elected government now rules in his stead. The threat of nuclear or biological weapons development in Iraq was neutralized.<\/p>\n
When President Bush stood on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003 he declared an end to major combat operations in Iraq<\/a><\/strong>. He never once uttered the words ‘mission accomplished,’ yet the MSM has made certain two words on a banner overshadowed the very important 1,829 words the president\u00a0did<\/em> speak\u00a0that day. The president indicated that the United States and the coalition forces had prevailed “in the Battle of Iraq,” known as Operation Iraqi\u00a0Freedom. What is forgotten is that the speech that day indicated the beginning of a new SECOND war: the work of securing and reconstructing the country, specifically<\/p>\n We have difficult work to do in Iraq. We’re bringing order to parts of that country that remain dangerous. We’re pursuing and finding leaders of the old regime, who will be held to account for their crimes. We’ve begun the search for hidden chemical and biological weapons and already know of hundreds of sites that will be investigated. We’re helping to rebuild Iraq, where the dictator built palaces for himself, instead of hospitals and schools. And we will stand with the new leaders of Iraq as they establish a government of, by, and for the Iraqi people.<\/p>\n The transition from dictatorship to democracy will take time, but it is worth every effort. Our coalition will stay until our work is done. Then we will leave, and we will leave behind a free Iraq.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The president went on to say, “The battle of Iraq is one victory in a war on terror that began on September the 11, 2001 — and still goes on<\/em>.” Later he said, “Our mission continues<\/em>.”<\/p>\n I recently spoke with Victor Davis Hanson who told me that America’s anti-Iraq War mood finds its impetus in a lack of clairity on this second phase of the war:<\/p>\n The president did not articulate, I don’t think very well, what the stakes were: that he won a war, a brilliant war, and that all of the gloom and doomers who said we’d lose 5,000 to 10,000 dead we’re completely wrong, and now we’re not in the same war but in a very different second war which we can’t vacate because we’ve done that in the past. You need to tell the American people, “This isn’t new!” We tried the Republican\/Conservative Realpolitik, cozying up with the House of Saud, not going to Bahgdad, No-Fly zones, dealing with Musharraf. And then we did the Democratic appeasement, overlooking the first World Trade Center, the East African bombing, the USS Cole, and both of those were wrong. This is a corrective to almost everything we’ve tried in the past.<\/p>\n The president has to realize you can’t just assert you’re for freedom, you have to explain why freedom – it’s a very difficult thing to impart by force, we’ve done it in the past, it’s been difficult, but it will work. And rather than just assert, “We’re going to win; we’re going to give them freedom,” he needs to explain just how difficult it is. I think all along we should have had far less “Mission Accomplished” and much more “We had a bad choice and we had a worse choice.” There are never any good alternatives in the Middle East, so don’t get your hopes up too high, but we can still win this thing and we can win it at historically low cost, if you look back in the long story of war this country’s put up with.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n If indeed things are turning favorably in Iraq, why has that message not reached the American people? Especially with the proliferation of the blogosphere and alternatives to old media? Victor Davis Hanson:<\/p>\n I don’t think any of us have been able to disrupt the narrative of the IED and the suicide vest, so every time we try to enunciate how hard<\/em> it is to bring a constitutional government to the ancient Caliphe, and if you were to be successful, the wonderful dividends that would start to disrupt this old nexus between dictatorships and theocracies, and how important it is. If you look at the long view of history, that we are doing it amazingly well, even though it has taken four years. This is a country, after all, that lost 12,000 dead in six weeks at Okinawa. And we haven’t made as many military mistakes (in Iraq) as this country has made in places like Hedgerows or Iwo Jima. But that has to be asserted every day, because we have some of the most brilliant minds in this country, National Public Radio, PBS, Washington Post, New York Times, you know these people: architects of the Democratic Party who really don’t believe that a) we can win, and b) even more disturbingly, that we should<\/em> be able to win. They have a view of America that people will like us, they travel to Europe a lot, they will like us, they will praise us if we sort of retreat within our shores, invest our security and future with the United Nations, the World Court of the Hague, and that people in the world, such as radical Islamacists or China, these are really not that dangerous a group, but they’ve been sort of exaggerated by warmongers, industrial-military complex types in the United States. That narrative has sort of taken over Iraq as the news became only the violence and never that they’ve had a successful election, how big the Iraqi army is becoming, and how many good things we’re doing in that country compared to what, let’s say China is doing in the Sudan or what Russia did in Czechnya or what the Europeans are doing by selling almost anything the Iranian theocracy wants. The administration has not been able to get that message to the American people, that the United States of all the major contenders in the world, has the most humane and principled foreign policy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" What most America’s do not realize is that we actually won the war in Iraq. Sadaam was removed and brought to justice. A democratically elected government now rules in his stead. The threat of nuclear or biological weapons development in … Continue reading