So, I heard the most disturbing thing this morning. I really don’t know why, specifically, it was disturbing, but it got me quite perturbed. Perhaps equally odd is that I wake up to NPR in the morning. They do have decent news coverage, even if it is a lefty slant in many cases. That being said, I wouldn’t listen to their political commentary even if a lefty tied me to a chair and made me 😛
Anyhoo, I usually listen to the news when I am waking up. I usually lay there for about 10-15 minutes just listening as my brain boots up for the day. They got to a story about the war in Iraq, of course. The House and Senate have been failing left and right to pass withdrawal measures–go figure, with both houses under Democratic control 😛
The last thing I heard before going into a total tizzy and jumping out of bed was that the House is trying to pass a measure, instead, to ban permanent US bases. I jumped out of bed spouting nearly every curse known to humankind.
The Democrats are, of course, saying that we’ve lost to the terrorists and it’s time to scamper away and let chaos take hold. The Republicans see the insurgency as a setback, but an overcome-able one. Neither party seems to have publically acknowledged that it took 20 years or so to rebuild Germany after WWII. Here we are, a mere four years after we went into Iraq, and we’re already “weary” of it.
The comparison obviously has its flaws–there were no large-scale insurgency movements to the degree we see in Iraq today, in Germany or Japan. But, the process of rebuilding a country is something we’ve done before. The added insurgency here, obviously, adds certain difficulty to it. We are the ones who tore the country up, we’re the ones who supplanted a dictator. We owe the Iraqi people big-time; we need to leave the country better than it was when we came in.
It’s going to take a long time, just as it did in post-Nazi Germany. It may take longer because of that insurgency–which is probably more comparable to Northern Ireland than Germany. But, the cost of a completely chaotic Iraq without our presence is pretty damn high. The cost of surrender to the insurgents is even higher.
It was one thing to pull out of Vietnam…Vietnam wasn’t officially a war, it was a training exercise for the South Vietnamese army. The price is far higher if we run from Iraq, all because we’re uncomfortable with going toe-to-toe with the filth that is the insurgency.
The banning of permanent US bases in Iraq just puts a nail in the coffin for the Democrats. They really don’t seem to know WTF they are doing. They don’t know the consequences of the actions they are trying to take, or the implications to the greater extremist Islamic movement. If we pull out of Iraq completely, there’s going to be hell to pay. Iraq will look to us in the future and hate us for abandoning them, it will embolden those elements of Al-Qaeda in Iraq which are inflicting harm on us and the Iraqis.
I’m just upset because we’re obviously war-weary–or so the Democrats would have the general populace believe. Perhaps there is some truth to that; people have had 2-3 tours in Iraq lasting up to 18 months. Then again, was it any different in WWII? I’m convinced that, if we were to fight WWII today, we’d probably lose the damn thing 😛