The national media fully supports an immediate pullout, without serious regard for the consequent slaughter that would break loose in the aftermath of our shameful retreat. The New York Times editorial “The Road Home” states the evil intentions in plain newsprint.
It is time for the United States to leave Iraq, without any more delay than the Pentagon needs to organize an orderly exit.
This goes beyond isolationist idiocy. This ranks as cowardice in the face of a determined enemy. The logical syllogism behind the arguments in this editorial can also be reduced to simple declarative sentences. The War in Iraq is unpopular. People die there that would otherwise enjoy productive lives. Therefore, the War in Iraq is wrong.
In an utter moral vacuum, with no relation to any recent US History, this argument appeals to simple instinct. It’s not until we point out that The American Civil War was unpopular and that the combined Union and Confederate Armies lost more soldiers in a handful of days, at Gettysburg, at Antietam and then again at Shiloh, than we’ve lost in four years in Iraq, that this argument is exposed as sophomoric.
What happens after the US withdraws? The New York Times believes its time to send in the United Nations Peacekeepers. The ones raping children in Sudan while open air slave markets operate near their AOs. Yes, the very same ones who stood by and gawked at the butchery in Rwanda and Burundi.
The United Nations has a bunch of funny clowns and can walk an impressive rhetorical tightrope when forced to offer justification for the waste, fraud and abuse of power that has become their organizational hallmark. Yet still, they don’t make the children smile when that particular circus comes to town. Don Surber describes the idiocy of handing Iraq over to UN peacekeepers.
Africa burns while UN blue helmets look askance and indulge themselves in child porn and petty theft. That is the Times prescription for Iraq.
The chaos would result in zero civil liberties for 25 million Iraqis. The Times clamored for extraconstitutional rights for 500 or so jihadists at Gitmo — men captured on the battlefield. Now the Times is willing to forfeit any civil justice system at all in Iraq.
What makes this even more galling is the action taking place on the ground. Two summers ago, Muqtada Al Sadr was a scourge. Attila of the Mosque was held up as the number one example of why the US could never stabilize Iraq. Now, he’s commuting back and forth between Iraq and Iran, while his Mahdi Army disintegrates into the desert as it fights among itself.
When even Prime Minister Maliki feels bold enough to demand that the Mahdi Army disarm, in the face of threats from al-Sadr’s aides, the weather has turned against Muqtada al-Sadr.
Even more telling than al-Sadr’s inability to intimidate the new Iraqi Government off of the battlefield, has been his loss of respect among his own followers. His last two fiery sermons have failed to ignite much kindling. He’s been preaching to empty pews. He’s enjoying worse ratings than a rock concert promoted by Enviromullah al-Gore.
So, in the face of al-Sadr being slowly ground into the dust, our Congress demands immediate retreat. They seem to fear gradual, painful success more than all-out chaos and genocide that would break loose in our absence. They bought the lie that Muqtada al-Sadr was a fungible good, rather than a talented religious politician. They want this over by dinner time, so that they can get a good night’s sleep.
Most of Congress lacks the open honesty of a Dennis Kucinich or a Cindy Sheehan. They don’t want to go on the record as a bunch of niggling wet-nurses to failure. So instead of openly demanding that the war end now and passing legislation with exactly that stated intent, they threaten funding games, and look for disaffected Republicans to hide behind, in hopes of claiming they are being bipartisan in their disavowal of the conflict. They seem to want us to buy the propaganda that anything bipartisan has to be good. We’re supposed to ignore the historical fact that The Fugitive Slave Act was the result of a bipartisan congressional compromise.
The New York Sun describes details of the two-prong strategy being pursued to leave Iraq twisting in the winds.
One of these amendments — from Senator Webb, who had a great record in Vietnam and in the Reagan administration but who is now in the anti-war camp — would make it impossible to relieve the GIs on the ground come January and March, by which point most would have to redeploy home. Other amendments, like one offered by Senator Feingold, would fix a date in April for the full retreat.
The Democrats are counting on a growing number of Republicans who, in respect of the war, are now opposing the president from their own party. Senators Domenici and Lugar, of Arizona and Indiana, have in the last two weeks added their voice to the caucus of waverers. It would not be surprising were the ranking Republican on the Armed Services Committee, Senator Warner, to go overboard on Monday.
Thus, we have an army in the field which has smashed the villainous militia of Muqtada al-Sadr and sent him running to Iran a disgraced coward. We have a mass media and a congress that wants to run in the other direction and remove all our forces from Iraq. This will create a vacuum that lies between Iran and Saudi Arabia and could give one nation or the other the upper hand in the Islamic Civil War between Shi’ite and Sunni.
Thus, if Iraq gets de-funded and left as the next battleground in Islam’s eternal self-purge, there will be no way to avoid the obvious conclusion that the United Sates of America will have committed a grave moral wrong. We will bear the label of traitor before every nation in the world that dreams of graduating from thugocratic oligarchies and feudal despots. We will have promised them deliverance; we will have given them Jim Webb’s funding amendment. We should at least have the decency to compose a proper oration to commemorate their impending mass funerals which will take place in our wake.
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