Don's Tuesday Column

THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson  Red Bluff Daily News   6/24/2014

A decade on, Iraq returns to this local conservative’s column

Chief Probation Officer Dave Muench will share his thoughts with the Tea Party Patriots tonight at 6 PM at the Westside Grange. Several other topics are on tap, including a video series on Agenda 21. Hardly a conspiracy theory, this United Nations-driven program’s goal is the ordering of land use and resource allocation in America to conform to global warming alarmist demands. In its design, humans should occupy less land in higher densities, while ever-greater expanses of earth’s surface should return to human- and resource-extraction-free conditions. That’s sustainability: you live in less, on less, use less and it will all cost you more.

It’s ironic that, in the 10^th year of writing this weekly, local, conservative-oriented column, the Iraq War is once again prominent and controversial. Many columns pushed back and refuted the incessant lies and propaganda from the anti-war left that proliferated in public debate on this page. As is often said, “a lie can circle the world before the truth can put on slippers,” the simplified (and deceptively simple-minded) “Bush lied, soldiers died” mantra fueled waves of hysterical anti-Bush/Iraq war zealots uninterested in a calm examination of counter-narratives.

Among factually true narratives: 1) Due to public support for the war, Democrats demanded votes so they could be on record supporting the 22 articles of indictment against Saddam Hussein justifying the “Authorization for Use of Force” in Iraq; 2) Those same Democrats, including Hillary Clinton (who cited President Bill Clinton’s intel), touted and professed their convictions over Saddam’s use and expected stockpiles of WMDs—recent news items reported that current ISIS militants took over an Iraqi WMD-stockpile facility, others deduced that chemical weapons used in Syria could only have come from Saddam—but, never mind;

3) Numerous commissions in America and Britain found no misrepresentation by their leaders of the intelligence used to make WMD-related pronouncements; 4) UN weapons inspectors concluded that Saddam Hussein retained and maintained the programs and capabilities to restart chemical, biological and even nuclear weapons once, as expected, sanctions were lifted on his regime; 5) As long as they respected, and gave obedience to, Saddam’s authority, terrorists were allowed to have training camps in Iraq—as long as Saddam could retain “plausible deniability” of encouraging them;

6) President Bush, faced with a military path to defeat in 2006, made the case for, overrode predictions of failure over, and—in one of the gutsiest military calls by a modern president—ordered the surge of troops and an expansion of strategy to deliver a crushing defeat of both Shiite militias and Sunni/al Qaeda terrorists. That prepared the way for elections that established the only Middle Eastern county (besides Israel) to have representative self-governance, accomplished only through “boots on the ground” and sacrifices by our military.

Wars have always been such. Massive destruction and loss of life necessarily accompanied the defeat of the South in the Civil War; likewise, World War II and Hitler’s Nazi-led Germany. Union troops occupied the South; tens of thousands of American troops remained in Germany to secure the gains and keep the people in a state of passive compliance. Likewise, Japan.

Presidents Truman and Eisenhower only secured a free, economically vibrant and safe South Korea with massive sacrifices and gutsy military calls. Such South Korean gains were also secured for that nation’s posterity by tens of thousands of our soldiers at the border with North Korea. Our military is an ever-present threat of America’s might coming down on the “Nork’s” pot-bellied dictators like the proverbial “ton of bricks” from Hades—if they try to impose starvation, impoverishment and brutal dictatorship on South Korea.

Bush’s Iraq: During the surge, America’s military, together with the “Great Awakening” among regular Sunnis, defeated Sunni terrorists; Marginalized Shiite militias posed diminishing threats to Iraq’s government; The parties and religious sects of Iraq regarded America’s military as fair arbiters of central governmental power; Our troops at combat outposts reported that the percent of missions encountering “hostile contact” declined from about 20-30 percent to about one percent.

That sounds like an expensive but successful conclusion of major hostilities under President Bush, which required only a residual force of some tens of thousands of soldiers and Marines, under diminishing physical threat, to sustain. I’ve read that Bush intended such a presence but wanted to leave maximum flexibility for his successor, Barack Obama, who chose the “bug out” approach, defying all of the lessons of past conflicts (America lost thousands of troops in the Philippines a century ago but stayed there to secure our hard-fought gains). Obama truly is losing what Bush and our brave, heroic military won.

By the way, America’s role in Vietnam could have ended successfully if 1) counterinsurgency efforts had been maintained, 2) if bombing of North Vietnam had continued until they pleaded for surrender, or 3) if Congressional Democrats had honored commitments to provide support and material to the elected government of South Vietnam against the North. Democrats and their news media sycophants simply do not want, for ideological reasons the way I see it, America and our military held up as models of success and strength in the world.