Bush's Exit Strategy In Iraq Is Victory
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
Posted Friday, May 18, 2007 4:30 PM PT
The Presidency: George W. Bush, obeying a U.N. mandate, set out to dethrone a mass murderer and an aggressive tyrant, expand democracy and take the war on terror to the enemy. He's done all that and more.
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Much has been made of the "Mission Accomplished" banner that sailors hung on the USS Abraham Lincoln to welcome President Bush's arrival on the carrier's deck on May 1, 2003. They were enthusiastic and victorious, fresh from supporting the most rapid military advance in history, a stunning victory that liberated 25 million people and deposed a brutal mass murderer who made war against his neighbors and his own people.
Gen. George Patton's Third Army, in what has been widely regarded as the most impressive armored attack in history, took four months to battle from the Falaise Gap in France to the Rhine. The U.S. Army's Third Infantry Division traveled the same distance in two weeks.
Few remember that President Bush never actually used those two famous words, "Mission Accomplished." But he would have been justified in doing so, just as Lincoln would have been in saying those words at Gettysburg.
Both knew that more difficult days lay ahead, but both knew they were on their way to victory.
Bush did not proclaim peace in our time, but rather: "We have difficult work to do in Iraq." He said: "We're helping to rebuild Iraq, where the dictator built palaces for himself, instead of hospitals and schools. And we will stand with the new leaders of Iraq as they establish a government of, by and for the Iraqi people."
Yes, there have been mistakes and surprises, just as Gen. Dwight Eisenhower didn't anticipate the Battle of the Bulge or Adm. Nimitz the kamikazes. President Lincoln was forced to switch commanders from the incompetent Gen. George McClellan to the brutally effective Gens. U.S. Grant and William T. Sherman. But he never abandoned the goal of victory. Bush has switched to Gen. David Petraeus and has a new "surge" strategy.
It is said that no strategy survives contact with the enemy. But Bush's strategy is clearly a copy of Reagan's effective strategy during the Cold War: "We win. They lose."
Petraeus says we will know by fall if the surge is working, but there are telling signs it is.
Muqtada al-Sadr, head of the vaunted Mahdi army, has fled to Iran. His forces have splintered into small groups of street thugs. And Sunni tribal leaders in the former jihadist stronghold of Anbar province are now backing coalition and Iraqi forces against the jihadists.
"Anbar was the worst place in Iraq through most of 2006," retired four-star Gen. Jack Keane told IBD recently. Al-Qaida terrorists under the leadership of Abu Ayyub al-Masri ruled with an iron fist. Now violence is down in Ramadi and the rest of the province and al-Qaida is not welcome.
Much of the credit goes to patriots such as Army Col. Sean McFarland, who helped unite Anbar's sheiks into an alliance of more than 200 opposed to al-Qaida's murderous reign. The tribes began attacking al-Qaida leaders on U.S. target lists.
Critics have been impatient, saying the mission hasn't been accomplished and asking when the Iraqis will step up and fight for their country. The fact is they are, in both increasing numbers and effectiveness. Iraqi units now fight alongside American troops and on their own. Whole provinces have been turned over to their control. They've got our back, and we've got theirs.
Can they defend themselves without our help? Europe couldn't. That's why we formed NATO. As Benjamin Franklin once put it, either we hang together or we hang separately. Iraqis have shown courage and a willingness to risk their lives for their country. Few Americans would risk their lives to vote as Iraqis have on multiple occasions, first for an interim government, then to draft a constitution, then to vote for a permanent government
The jihadists in Iraq, like the Viet Cong, know they cannot win on the battlefield. But they hope, as in Vietnam, that nightly scenes of carnage on our plasma TVs will help them win in the media and in the halls of Congress. As al-Qaida's No. 2 thug, Ayman al-Zawahiri wrote in a 6,000-word letter dated July 8, 2005: "(W)e are in a battle, and more than half this battle is in the media."
The jihadists also count on congressional Democrats to do in 2007 to Iraq what the Watergate babies of 1974 did to South Vietnam. One of their first actions was to vote to deny South Vietnam $800 million in military aid, including ammunition and spare parts. Five weeks after that vote, North Vietnam began planning an armored invasion of the South, knowing we had grown war-weary and would not help.
Since the magnificent success of Operation Iraqi Freedom, Iraqis have regained their sovereignty, held three free elections, formed a constitutional government and tried, convicted and executed their former dictator for crimes against humanity. All in less time and with fewer casualties than in Germany, Japan and Korea, where we still have 70,000, 40,000 and 33,000 troops respectively.
Bush's achievement in Iraq will be best viewed through the prism of history, just as President Truman, who made the decision to use the atomic bomb and end World War II, is now viewed as a great president for unilaterally deciding to begin the resistance to communism in Greece, Turkey and Korea.
Like Lincoln, Bush is determined that freedom and democracy will not perish from the Earth and that the deaths of our soldiers will not be in vain. Honor the dead, don't just count them.
The best way to do that is to complete their mission. If the anti-war left wants to count anything, let it be the millions liberated from oppression and tyranny, and the untold numbers of Americans not killed in another 9/11.
Our death toll in Iraq isn't close to the carnage of a single battle in World War II, Iwo Jima, or one in our own Civil War, Antietam. Ironically, the place where John Murtha would have us "redeploy" — Okinawa — was the site of one of the bloodiest battles in human history, due in part to the Imperial Japanese version of the truck bomb: the kamikaze.
Did Bush "lie us into war"? He didn't say anything that every intelligence agency on this planet, along with most Democrats, wasn't saying. Saddam Hussein was always working on WMD, and if Israel hadn't bombed Osirak in 1981, Saddam would have had nukes when he invaded Kuwait.
This war is in fact a resumption of hostilities suspended after Desert Storm when we agreed to a cease-fire. Saddam violated that cease-fire as well as some 17 U.N. resolutions. This is not a new war, but the completion of the original U.N. mandate that began with the liberation of Kuwait.
Iraq is Islamofascism's Rhineland, the place where they've decided to test our will. This time Bush is calling their bluff, fighting a lesser war now to avoid a bigger one later, on our soil. He's learned the lessons of history and is determined not to repeat the mistakes of those who refused to.
This is a long war against a tenacious enemy — like the Cold War, which wasn't all that cold and which we won because Reagan, like Bush, also decided to take the battle to the enemy and resisted in places from Nicaragua to Grenada to Afghanistan.
On Sept. 20, 2001, Bush told Congress and the nation: "Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign, unlike any other we have seen." He continued: "Our war with terror begins with al-Qaida, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated."
Not if the Democrats have their way.
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