First I am going to start with the New York Times and an op-ed piece that will be lining some birdcage by the end of the day called "The Road Home" in which the writer finally admits the chaos and devastation that would follow a premature withdrawal, including genocide, and claims that would be preferable to fighting until we win.
That conversation must be candid and focused. Americans must be clear that Iraq, and the region around it, could be even bloodier and more chaotic after Americans leave. There could be reprisals against those who worked with American forces, further ethnic cleansing, even genocide. Potentially destabilizing refugee flows could hit Jordan and Syria. Iran and Turkey could be tempted to make power grabs. Perhaps most important, the invasion has created a new stronghold from which terrorist activity could proliferate.
A couple paragraphs above that he writer then goes into complete intellectual dishonesty by making this statement:
Continuing to sacrifice the lives and limbs of American soldiers is wrong.
Let me take a second here to remind the author of this "opinion piece" that our troops are reenlisting in record numbers, 588 of them on July 4th, 2007 alone, in Iraq.
A total of 588 troops signed up for another stint, according to a U.S. military statement, while 161 soldiers became naturalized American citizens. The ceremonies took place at Camp Victory, the sprawling American headquarters at the western end of the Iraqi capital.
The troops who have been in Iraq fighting, understand the importance of our fight there as well as our humanitarian efforts to build schools and help the Iraqi achieve the freedom they overwhelmingly asked for by showing up to vote in their first elections to the tune of 12 million people.
They keep reenlisting.This is something that the writer of the NYT bird liner piece will never understand because the troops are there and are witness to the progress and successes and are stating in no uncertain terms, that they can and will succeed in their mission and they keep reenlisting because they want to be a part of helping the Iraqis achieve independence.
In a starkly contrasting piece, the SAME PAPER, the New York Times, tells us of some major successes. Obviously the opinion writer doesn't read the copy from the reporters showing the type of progress that is being seen on the ground in Iraq. (Even though the progress piece came out two days before the opinion piece)
BAQUBA, Iraq, June 30 — Capt. Ben Richards had been battling insurgents from Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia for three weeks when he received an unexpected visitor.
Abu Ali walked into the Americans’ battle-scarred combat outpost with an unusual proposal: the community leader was worried about the insurgents, and wanted the soldiers’ help in taking them on.
The April 7 meeting was the beginning of a new alliance and, American commanders hope, a portent of what is to come in the bitterly contested Diyala Province.
Using his Iraqi partners to pick out the insurgents and uncover the bombs they had seeded along the cratered roads, Captain Richards’s soldiers soon apprehended more than 100 militants, including several low-level emirs. The Iraqis called themselves the Local Committee; Captain Richards dubbed them the Kit Carson scouts.
“It is the only way that we can keep Al Qaeda out,” said Captain Richards, who operates from a former Iraqi police station in the Buhritz sector of the city that still bears the sooty streaks from the day militants set it aflame last year.
The American military has struggled for more than four years to train and equip the Iraqi Army. But here the local Sunni residents, including a number of former insurgents from the 1920s Revolution Brigades, have emerged as a linchpin of the American strategy.
Which brings me to Wapo piece called "Leave Iraq and Brace for a Bigger Bloodbath", where unlike the opinion piece in the NYT, the writer of this piece understands that quitting because the fight is hard, is not an option we should be even contemplating.
Iraqis call Ali Hassan al-Majeed "Chemical Ali," and few wept when the notorious former general received five death sentences last month for ordering the use of nerve agents against his government's Kurdish citizens in the late 1980s. His trial came as a reckoning and a reminder -- summoning up the horrors of Saddam Hussein's rule even as it underscored the way today's heated Iraq debates in Washington have left the key issue of human rights on the sidelines. People of goodwill can certainly disagree over how to handle Iraq, but human rights should be part of any responsible calculus. Unfortunately, some leaders continue to play down the gross violations in Iraq under Hussein's republic of fear and ignore the potential for a human rights catastrophe should the United States withdraw.
THIS is what our soldiers and our President understand and this is what the Democratic politicians refuse to acknowledge.
Rest assured that if we were to have a precipitate withdrawal, the NYT as well as all the other news media will eagerly show us the ramification in every days news, the beheadings, the torture of those that sided with us to help rid themselves of al-Qeada and insurgents. Dead babies would fill our screens on the nightly news. We would see pictures of leveled villages where whole families and towns would be wiped out.
The humanitarian catastrophe would be laid directly at our doorstep for the world to see.
Headlines would include but not be limited to "Americans abandon Iraqi children to a fate worse than death" and things like that and they would be right.
Wapo goes on to give us some facts and figures we do not often hear from our MSM:
For most people, life under totalitarianism is slavery with no possibility of escape. That is why despite the carnage in Iraq, Iraqis are consistently less pessimistic about the present and more optimistic about the future of their country than Americans are. In a face-to-face national poll of 5,019 people conducted this spring by Opinion Research Business, a British market-research firm, only 27 percent of Iraqis said they believed that "that their country is actually in a state of civil war," and by nearly 2 to 1 (49 percent to 26 percent), the Iraqis surveyed said they preferred life under their new government to life under the old tyranny. That is why, at a time when many Americans are abandoning the vision of a democratic Iraq, most Iraqis still cling to the hope of a better future. They know that under Hussein, there was no hope.
[...]
Of course, Hussein's removal has created a host of difficult strategic challenges, and numerous human rights atrocities have been committed since his ouster. But let us be under no illusion of what life under Hussein was like. He was a mass murderer who tortured children in front of their parents, gassed Kurds, slaughtered Shiites, started two wars with his neighbors and launched Scud missiles into downtown Riyadh and Tel Aviv. The price for the stability that Hussein supposedly brought to the region was mass graves, hundreds of thousands of dead in Iraq, and terrorism and war outside it. Difficult as the challenges are today -- with Iran and Syria trying to stymie democracy in Iraq, with al-Qaeda turning Iraq into the central battleground in its holy war of terrorism against the free world, and with sectarian militias bent on murder and mayhem -- there is still hope that tomorrow may be better.
No one can know for sure whether President Bush's "surge" of U.S. troops in Iraq will succeed. But those who believe that human rights should play a central role in international affairs should be doing everything in their power to maximize the chances that it will. For one of the consequences of failure could well be catastrophe.
When did politics become more important than a childs life? When did political posturing become more important than liberty?
Finally, when did we, as a country, become so cynical that genocide of innocent men, women and children, is more appropriate than an all volunteer military fighting for the safety, liberty and ability of what should be the Iraqi's RIGHT to live free of tyranny?
For those that argue that life under Saddam was better than life now in Iraq, they ignore the Iraqi's that say 2 to 1 that it was not.
Tell these victims that, or explain to their families how you justify your opinion.
Oh wait...you can't, most of their families died in that same chemical attack.
That picture above will be the type of things we see every single night on our news if we should leave before we have accomplished what we set out to do.
Our soldiers understand it is THESE children we are there to help. There to assure that these kids will grow up knowing the freedom that we, as Americans, take for granted.
America is the only hope these children have and only a cold hearted bastard would deny them the right to live free.
More on Iraq from Right Truth and Bottom Line Up Front. (Both, must read pieces)
[Update]Jack Army has a two part letter from an Iraqi citizen to the people of America. Part one is here and part two is here. (Well worth the read)
[Update #2] HCdl has a heart wrenching horror of al-Qaeda and astonishment that anybody, even Dems could wish THIS upon the children of Iraq.
Others discussing this:
Macsmind, Michael P.F. van der Galiën, Sister Toldjah, Badgers Forward, Don Surber, Jules Crittenden, Jammie Wearing Fool, Blue Crab Boulevard, Gateway Pundit, Wizbang.
Read them all, these are folks that understand that the children of Iraq are not expendable just because our Democratic politicians wish to posture for their far left screeching base.
More discussion at memeorandum.
Tracked back by:
The Big Shift from Charlie Foxtrot...
Trouble ahead in Syria and Lebanon from Right Truth...
.