Phil Brennan
Wednesday, Oct. 29, 2003
Look, I don't give a tinker's dam what you thought about going to war in Iraq. I couldn't care less if you were a hawk or a dove or something in between. The fact is that we are there, Americans (and Iraqis) are dying every day, and we have exactly two choices: Either we stay the course until the Iraqis are able to handle their own affairs, or we cut and run and resign ourselves to seeing that nation and the region descend into a state of unmitigated chaos.
There are those who might shrug their shoulders and ask "so what? It's not our business to worry about some hellhole half a world away. Let the buggers fend for themselves." There are others who would claim that whatever happens in the way of problems arising out of our initial involvement is just retribution for our bellicosity – in other words, we had it coming.
The problem is that things just don't work that way. Although our very enlightened liberal attitudes dismiss the very idea that actions have inevitable consequences, our bugging out of Iraq at this point would have the most serious effects worldwide.
Under the best of circumstances the Middle East is a seething cauldron, filled with religious and political turmoil. Sunnis hate Shiites, Shiites hate Sunnis, some hate Kurds, they all hate Israelis and Westerners and, for all I know, Druids.
To simply turn our backs on Iraq at this point is to guarantee that the cauldron will boil over and the entire region will explode into a jihad of the barely suppressed rage much of the Moslem world feels toward the West.
A very large part of the Arab world recalls how they were betrayed by the West – in this case Britain and France – after World War I, when the good fight they waged under T.E. Lawrence on behalf of the allies was rewarded by those two nations by dividing up Arab ancestral lands and creating unstable new nations, such as Iraq, to suit their interests and not those of the Arabs whose land, after all, it was.
That anger has never been suppressed and in recent years has been stirred up to a fever pitch by such terrorist movements as al-Qaeda. Our invasion of Iraq has little or nothing to do with Arab hostility. It's been there all along and they are simply taking advantage of the Iraq war and Coalition presence in the area to keep the pot boiling.
If you still think that none of this matters to us and we can just walk away from Iraq and leave it to the extremists, just wait until the gas pumps go dry and your oil burner shuts down and power plants stop making electricity. Add to that dismal prospect will be a huge increase in terrorism here in the U.S., where we have been relatively free of attacks since 9/11.
This is not idle speculation. Thanks to the Marxists who masquerade as environmentalists and the Socialist Democrat members of Congress who cave into their demands and keep us from drilling for oil in such places as ANWR, surely one of the most dismal places on the face of the Earth, we are heavily dependent upon Middle Eastern oil supplies, which at this point are irreplaceable.
Moreover, such non-Middle Eastern sources of oil as Venezuela are now firmly in the hands of hostile communist governments we'd have to occupy militarily if we wanted to ensure that our supplies of oil from those countries would be uninterrupted.
Now, I recognize that most of these dissidents understand that we are stuck with the Iraq problem and can't simply walk away, but what I can't understand is the drumfire of very vocal criticism they continue to direct at the U.S. involvement and the Bush administration's handling of it. Don't these people understand the concept of giving aid and comfort to the enemy?
A little while ago I heard an interview with Bernard Kerik, the former New York City police commissioner and hero of 9/11 who went to Iraq to create and train the new police force. He bluntly stated that the harsh criticism of the U.S. effort from politicians and the media is encouraging the mounting number of terrorist attacks against Coalition forces and the Iraqi people.
Earlier, Kerik had told a Harvard Club audience, as reported Oct. 16 in NewsMax.com (See: "Kerik Takes Aim at Media Coverage of Iraq") that "The political criticism [on Iraq] in this country is becoming our enemy's best friend. They [the Iraqis] only know and see the criticisms ... for our people on the ground in Iraq it is not a good thing and hopefully at some point in time someone is going to see it and realize it and stop it. ..."
"They [the Iraqi terrorists] are watching the criticisms, they are watching the frustrations. They believe that the more they attack and the more they pound, the more they hurt the Coalition, there's a better chance they [the Coalition] will pull out."
Kerik went on to state that such media coverage has led many anti-U.S. elements in Iraq to "underestimate" the "resolve" of President Bush to "stay the course."
Back in World War II there were Americans who did not believe that the U.S. had any business getting involved in another European war, and those who believed that President Roosevelt had deliberately provoked the Japanese into attacking us by creating an intolerable situation that literally forced their hand.
Yet once the bombs fell on Pearl Harbor they fell in behind their country and, above all, kept their doubts to themselves, even when the chant "Yankee go home" kept getting louder in areas we were occupying and trying to rebuild at war's end.
They were willing to stay the course. They recognized that behind that chant was the Soviet Union and our own domestic communists, who were demanding that we get out of Europe and leave it to Stalin's tender mercies.
I can't imagine how their fellow Americans would have reacted had they done otherwise and acted as many of President Bush's critics are acting today, practically dancing in the streets every time a U.S. soldier is killed in the streets of Baghdad. They can't wait to chant "See, we told you so." And if you listen to them, they are close to taking up the cry "Yankee come home."
Maybe going into Iraq as we did was not a good idea, and then again, maybe it was. But now that we are there we have to finish what we started, and to those perpetual juveniles who continue to give aid and comfort and encouragement to the enemy by their constant carping, I have a few words of advice: Just shut up and let the adults do their job.
Faugh 'a Ballagh
Phil Brennan is a veteran journalist who writes for NewsMax.com. He is editor & publisher of Wednesday on the Web (http://www.pvbr.com) and was Washington columnist for National Review magazine in the 1960s. He also served as a staff aide for the House Republican Policy Committee and helped handle the Washington public relations operation for the Alaska Statehood Committee which won statehood for Alaska. He is also a trustee of the Lincoln Heritage Institute and a member of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers.
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