Thoughts on the Iraq Situation
Yesterday morning I happened to catch Senator Levin’s mendacious and defeatist opening remarks at the Petraeus-Crocker hearings. I was very much saddened by his remarks - saddened that while our best and bravest and Iraq’s best and bravest are shedding their blood for victory, a US Senator could say this:
Even the few small political steps that have been taken by the Iraqis are in jeopardy because of the incompetence and excessively sectarian leadership of Mr. Maliki. Last week, this incompetence was dramatized in the military operation in Basra. Far from being the “defining moment” President Bush described, it was a haphazardly planned operation, carried out apparently without meaningful consultation with the U.S. military or even key Iraqi leaders, while Maliki made unrealistic claims, promises and threats.
Outside of being entirely divorced from reality, I additionally fail to see how insulting the Iraqi government and its military is going to help us prevail in Iraq. But that, of course, is the actual point for the Democrats - they don’t want us to prevail in Iraq because their entire political narrative for 2008 hangs on Iraq being a failure…if Iraq is other than a failure, then Democrats have no rationale for being elected in November. As has become all too common amongst Democrats, the power of the Democratic party trumps all other considerations, including those of basic decency. Fortunately, in General Petraeus we have a man who will tell us the truth:
Underpinning the advances of the past year has been improvements in Iraq’s security institutions.
An increasingly robust Iraqi-run training base enabled the Iraqi security forces to grow by over 133,000 soldiers and police over the past 16 months. And the still-expanding training base is expected to generate an additional 50,000 Iraqi soldiers and 16 army and special operations battalions through the rest of 2008, along with 23,000 police and eight national police battalions.
Additionally, Iraq’s security ministries are steadily improving their ability to execute their budgets. As this chart shows, in 2007, as in 2006, Iraq’s security ministries spent more on their forces than the United States provided through the Iraqi Security Forces Fund.
We anticipate that Iraq will spend over $8 billion on security this year and $11 billion next year. And this projection enabled us recently to reduce significantly our Iraqi Security Forces Fund request for fiscal year 2009 from $5.1 billion to $2.8 billion.
While improved Iraqi security forces are not yet ready to defend Iraq or maintain security throughout the country on their own, recent operations in Basra highlight improvements in the ability of the Iraqi security forces to deploy substantial numbers of units, supplies and replacements on very short notice. They certainly could not have deployed a division’s worth of army and police units on such short notice a year ago. On the other hand, the recent operations also underscored the considerable work still to be done in the area of logistics, force enablers, staff development, and command and control.
No, the Iraqi forces in Basra didn’t fight like Green Berets, Marines or Army Rangers - but they fought, and they won. In spite of Levin’s slander of the Iraqi army, it was Sadr and his goons who called off the battle, not the Iraqi army. We’re moving our troops out, we’re spending less of our money on the Iraqi army, and when Basra exploded into battle it was Iraqi soldiers who bore the brunt of the battle as Iraq’s political class united behind the Iraqi armed forces - in other words, everything the surge was supposed to accomplish was on bold display in Basra…and yet Democrats continue to denigrate the whole effort, and cast insult upon our Iraqi allies.
I’m heartsick over this whole thing, and I worry greatly for our nation - a great nation and little minds go ill together, and Democrats are ever more proving that they have the smallest minds possible; and they add to it a weak heart and cowardly desire to kowtow to our enemies, rather than fight them. They could win in November, and undo all that we as a nation have accomplished at immense expenditure of blood and treasure. All that has been fought for will be thrown away if Democrats emerge in control in January - Iraq will be passed on to Iran and the terrorists, Lebanon will revert to a Syrian colony and around the world nations confronting terrorism will seek to make the best deal they can, because they will rest assured that for all of America’s talk, we lack the will to stick it out until victory. We’ve only just now recovered that reliability as an ally we threw away in Vietnam, and Democrats are bent on throwing it away again - and this time for good.
If anyone out there thinks that a President Obama will be respected by our enemies and that our enemies will delightedly negotiate a fair deal with us, then you’ve got rocks in your head. Anyone who believes that is a purblind idiot - our enemies will rejoice that an ignorant tool of the kook left is in charge of America, and the only thing the varied tyrants out there will fear is that some other tyrant might gain a larger surrender from Obama than they will. Iraq is, indeed, the defining moment of our time - we either win this in Iraq, or suffer a crushing, global defeat. And the only way we can win this, dear friends, is for John McCain to be sworn in on January 20th. Remember that! McCain means victory; Democrats mean defeat - and not just defeat for the GOP, but defeat for America.
117 comments April 9th, 2008
