Posted by
dolfinwriter on Sunday, May 03, 2009 12:42:49 AM
I responded to a comment about faith and prayer, where I wrote:
Yet today the left would come unglued if a military commander gave any indication that he was praying for wisdom and guidance that he was making the right decision.
Don't even go there. Next you're going to bring up GWB and the lives of the soldiers in Iraq... just don't. We disagree whether the Iraq War will make us safer, and we won't know for some time, though the left has been claiming since before the invasion that it would fail and it would be a quagmire and we would never win and that it wouldn't make us safer... They couldn't possibly know then, and you can't possibly know now.
What I DO know is that the lives of our soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines who were murdered by terrorists before 9/11 WERE wasted, because we did NOTHING to avenge them or to extract a price of any kind from those responsible. And I include Ronald Reagan in this indictment for the mistake of pulling out of Beirut after Hezbollah murdered 241 of our Marines there in 1983.
The left extrapolates from this that that the invasion of Iraq and ultimately the execution of Saddam is somehow payback, revenge, blind retribution on someone—ANYONE for those crimes… (and there the leftist ideology is again revealed—it’s not a war that was declared on US 30 years ago; it’s a law enforcement problem).
I have long said that it’s not just about 9/11.
I was angry after 9/11, and I’m angry that before 9/11 we did not respond in any meaningful way to terrorist attacks on our people. I cite terrorist attacks that killed Americans before 9/11, mostly our military, for my support of the Iraq War.
It’s not just about 9/11!
I'm not saying that I wanted the Iraq invasion as retribution for what has happened to our military people during the tenures of Presidents Clinton, Bush and Reagan.
Appropriate military response should never be about rage or revenge, and righteous retaliation is about more than simple revenge. There are many examples in history to show that blind rage and bigotry can cause people to do horrible things.
On the other hand, sometimes mistakes are made that have nothing to do with rage or revenge. FDR labeled the sneak attack on our Navy and Army on Oahu “dastardly”, but afterward our nation did terrible things to Japanese immigrants and American citizens of Japanese descent after Pearl Harbor.
In spite of this treatment of their families, Japanese-Americans fought bravely in WWII. They were generally forbidden to serve in the Pacific Theater, but in the European Theater, both the 442nd Infantry Regiment and the 100th Infantry Battalion immediately impressed their commanders with their valor in combat, and the 442nd became the most highly decorated unit in the history of American armed forces, including 21 Medal of Honor recipients.
So let us never make the same kind of mistake again.
Wrong as it was, the interment of Japanese-Americans was done not as retribution, but a misguided effort to keep the homeland safe from further Japanese attack.
Today the left continues to repeat the lie that Bush lied about Saddam’s WMDs, but it was really that necessity to protect the homeland from further attack that led us to invade Iraq and depose Saddam Hussein. You can see that in the statements from every Democrat who voted to give President Bush authorization to use military force. I’m not going to bother to quote them or link to them, because anyone who would claim they didn’t happen should just be medicated.
My whole point in the comment above was basically trying to describe what a man in power might go through in making decisions to send young soldiers to certain death. I said that he would likely pray for guidance, pray for wisdom, pray that he was doing the right thing and furthermore that it would be successful so that the lives given bravely would not be in vain.
But even as I wrote it, I could just hear those on the left saying, "But George Bush sent our soldiers to Iraq to die in vain, and you have no problem with that!"
So while I can hear them saying that the lives of the soldiers who have died in Iraq were in vain, I vehemently disagree. And by contrast, those who have been murdered by terrorists with no meaningful response from us WERE in vain. That's it.
So on one hand the left seems quite adept at reading into things that aren't there, as they do with Palin quotes (and when they can’t credibly misinterpret it, they lie and falsely revise it).
On another hand, it's NOT that simple. It's more complicated than adding 2 + 2 and getting 5. It's more like solving 2x +2=6 and saying that x = 5. So let me try to unravel my reasons.
Atheism is the world’s SECOND MOST intolerant religion, and I think committed atheists would fall down in fits of convulsions if they ever saw how our Founding Fathers prayed, not to mention how our military leaders and our succeeding Presidents, including some of their Democratic heroes, have prayed before major military operations like the Normandy Invasion, or the Tarawa Invasion, or Pres. Truman before giving the order to drop the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I think they have filled their heads with this idea that anyone who prays to God could only be looking for God to tell them what HE wants them to do, and in the mind of the atheist, this makes them “wacko”, and somehow violates the designed firewall between church and state.
In Mel Gibson's movie "We Were Soldiers Once... and Young", Lt. Col. Moore prays with one of his soldiers before they went into battle with the North Vietnamese, even asking God to ignore his new enemy’s “heathen prayers”. Say what you will about Hollywood, the REAL Lt. Col. Moore was Ok with Mel Gibson playing him, and endorsed the movie as historically accurate. I wonder if the left would consider Lt. Col Moore a wacko, now more than 40 years ago…
Believe it or not, I would probably oppose the Iraq invasion today based on one of the commonly cited reasons. Not because of intelligence about WMDs, but another reason. To avoid confusion, I'll explain that later. But any reasonable person MUST concede that we ONLY know that the intelligence was faulty BECAUSE we invaded and verified it. The claims that inspections were working are foolish and naïve. Hans Blix is either a goof or just another corrupt UN official.
For now though…
There is the fact that Bill Clinton, in spite of repeated promises to bring the terrorists to justice, never did a damned thing to the terrorists. Period. Instead he used Saddam's WMDs as an excuse to launch massive and sustained air strikes for the sole purpose of distracting the nation and Congress when he was being impeached for Lewinski. Let’s not get into whether that Congressional fiasco was warranted; it’s irrelevant (or at least it WAS irrelevant until the liberal media started crawling up Bristol Palin’s skirt with a flashlight!) The fact is that he WAS impeached, and ONLY on the night before the vote on his impeachment did he order Operation Desert Fox. There was no new information that we had not already possessed for several weeks, so why THAT NIGHT to start bombing Saddam (and all the innocent civilians who were killed!)? Hmmm…
But I digress… Or am I?
Ronald Reagan at least put the fear of OUR God into Qadafi for his part in Flight 103 and other terrorist actions (or did Qadafi realize it was at least the 3rd time in history that America had kicked Libya/Tripoli’s butt, and that Reagan, like Jefferson, meant business?)
The left goes to great pains to make distinctions between Iran, Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Jordan, Libya, Palestine, etc.
But I don’t see it as a huge disjointed mess.
There is this concept in mosquito infested areas called drain the swamp (thus killing all of the mosquito larvae or at least exposing them to natural predators).
The Middle East is all one big interconnected, interwoven, sometimes hostile to each other, sometimes best of friends Malaria ridden mosquito swamp. Does "Muslim Brotherhood" or “Islamic Jihad” mean anything? Read Lawrence Wright’s “Looming Tower”.
Someday see MY book about all of the pranks that God has played on all of us. In this case, he put all the oil in such a backwards region of the world, all of which is ruled by the world’s MOST intolerant religion, Islam. What a recipe for conflict and bloodshed this has been!
Consider what Iraq was before the 2003 invasion; it was a terrorist supporting nation run by a maniacal dictator and his sons, BELIEVED BY ALL OF THE WORLD ([Cough] Except Russia!) to have WMDs, routinely shooting at our planes patrolling the no-fly zones and in other ways violating agreements that Saddam had made in order to be allowed to stay in power after the Gulf War and following UN Resolutions, and openly hostile to the US AND TO ALL OF HIS OWN NEIGHBORS, AND EVEN TO HIS OWN PEOPLE!!! (i.e., The Kurds whom he gassed)
NOW Iraq is a nascent democracy struggling with what that means, but rather than funding and training terrorists, they are training hundreds of thousands of police, security and soldiers to hunt and kill terrorists. Yes, to survive they will have to cleanse the corrupt and the traitorous from the ranks of their police and military, but we have no room to talk about corrupt government and law enforcement officials.
The left has asked so many times why didn’t we attack Iran, Syria, Lebanon, al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, North Korea, or China. Well, we DID attack al Qaeda, but the media has allowed the American people to forget Afghanistan, other than the Messiah’s empty promises that HE would go and get bin Laden where Bush dared not tread! (Now that the Messiah is in the White House, he is doing OH so much better than Bush did… Or not…)
The left has forgotten how it was that Saddam was not removed from power at the end of the FIRST Gulf War.
The left has forgotten about those SEVENTEEN UN Resolutions ordering Saddam to come clean about the WMDs that he either had or at least WANTED everyone to BELIEVE he had, and which every other intelligence agency in the world believed he had.
I’d like someone to name just one of the other entities that invaded, occupied, and basically raped the citizens of one of its neighbors and threatened its other neighbors, and then after being stopped and finally ejected by UN and coalition forces, had been allowed to stay in power on a number of conditions, including a promise to get rid of its WMDs.
I’d like someone to name just one of the other entities that had been routinely in violation of that promise for the previous 12 years.
I’d like someone to name just one of the other entities that had already been bombed by us REPEATEDLY in previous years for its failure to get rid of its WMDs as ordered.
I’d like someone to name just one of the other entities that had been under economic sanctions imposed by the UN for several years for its open defiance of its previous agreements and previous orders against it.
I’d like someone to name just one of the other entities that had SEVENTEEN UN Resolutions ORDERING it to get rid of its WMDs and to provide documentation of their destruction, and which furthermore had not complied with those orders.
I’d like someone to name just one of the other entities that at the time of the 2003 invasion was being barely contained and only by immense US expenditures to maintain blockading and air patrolling forces in the region, as well as ground forces in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia (much to bin Laden’s eternal consternation!)
I’d like someone to name just one of the other entities that was supposedly under UN sanctions, but was given an exception OSTENSIBLY only for food and medications, but was not-so-subtly using that exception to bribe UN officials and purchase weapons and WMD materials, in the process enriching a not insignificant number of UN officials, including Kofi Annan himself!
I'd like someone to name just one of the other entities for which United States official policy since the Clinton era was Regime Change!
The left either COMPLETELY IGNORES or is COMPLETELY IGNORANT OF these nine ten facts whenever they open their mouths about Iraq.
People on the left said we should go after Iran instead. But wait—wasn’t Bush already being accused of “Rushing” to war in Iraq? (after 12 years of failed containment—yeah, right) If Bush had gone after Iran, he would have been expected to wait for UN approval. Yeah right. Even if he GOT UN approval, he would never, EVER be given wording that would specify, “Get rid of it or face the full fury of the US military!” Bush would be expected to wait through SEVENTEEN or more UN resolutions that Iran would summarily ignore and flip the middle finger at.
Ok, North Korea. Wait, same thing.
China? Same thing.
Pakistan? Same thing.
Are you getting this?
If not al Qaeda and other terrorists hell-bent on destroying the United States, then who ARE the scumbags that our guys are fighting and killing in Iraq, anyway? Could they ALL be former Ba’ath party loyalists?
Furthermore, contrary to what the liberal media propagates, Saddam WAS talking to al Qaeda. Again, read Lawrence Wright's "Looming Tower". Or, I’ll save you the expense of the book. Read this:
Or this:
Or this:
But forget all that for a while…
I doubt it ever occurred to those on the left that we might have actually FOUND the WMDS and sneaked them out where WE could destroy them covertly before the bad guys could launch some kind of attack and get their hands on them. There have been a number of stories about how the ISG was frequently attacked, several armored cars were destroyed, at least two of their number killed and many more wounded…
There was also a story recently about 500 tons of yellow cake uranium that was sneaked out of Iraq and sold to a Canadian firm. Google it.
I know the left wants to believe Bush lied about the intelligence, but they're not willing to believe that he would lie about actually finding stockpiles of weapons.
There ARE men—and women—who put the interests of this country above their own political aspirations. I know the Bush-hating left would never believe that Bush could be one of those men, but I guarantee that Bill Clinton was NOT one of those men. That is why HE never would have had the huevos to go after Saddam as he should have… that is, unless he needed to create a diversion, and then only with a half-assed attempt to create the impression that he was actually getting serious about Saddam, ordering air strikes that did a lot of collateral damage, but which may or may not have actually destroyed ANY of their intended targets…
Yes, what I'm saying is that George Bush simply finished something that Bill Clinton SHOULD HAVE, and occasionally PRETENDED TO, but never did. And 9/11 made it fairly necessary to eliminate any gathering threat to us.
And here is the really telling thing—If Bill Clinton had somehow mustered the huevos to take out Saddam, seeing as how regime change in Iraq became official US policy during his tenure, the left would have supported him rather than opposing him! Did any Democrats oppose Operation Desert Fox?
But why would Bill Clinton have wanted to actually eliminate Saddam? Saddam was quite a useful tool for Bill Clinton. Ultimately it made no difference in the outcome of his impeachment, but a guy has to try, right?
This doesn't come from me knowing anything I shouldn't talk about, but from me knowing a bit about how the military works, and how our government actually works when it comes to threats to our security. It also comes from things I have read, that the left would NEVER read. And finally, because I understand something the left will never admit or accept—that George Bush, though flawed and certainly not the ideal conservative, IS a man who puts his convictions and the interests of his country above his own political interests.
I said that I would probably oppose the invasion of Iraq, but only for one of the reasons commonly given. To the best of my memory, we really didn’t start seeing evidence of this here, until just within the last year. Specifically, the idea that bringing freedom and democracy to Iraq would necessarily bring economic prosperity which the people in Iraq’s neighboring countries would want, driving them to overthrow their dictator governments and spread democracy, freedom and prosperity, improving living conditions throughout the Middle East. I really only needed to look close to home to see the fallacy in that logic. And I’ll bet NO ONE on the left even thought of this.
It is this; when they come HERE, formerly the freest of places to live and among the most prosperous, or Australia, or Canada, what do they do? Eventually they want to enforce Sharia Law and turn it into the same hellhole they escaped from to come here, and give up all of the freedoms they are entitled to here. So I no longer have any faith that they will appreciate the joys of freedom. And please don't say "We told you so!" No one had any clue then what I'm talking about now. The left said we would never win in Iraq, too.
Finally, I said that Lewinsky Gate was irrelevant, until Bristol Palin. For years we have been told that what Bill Clinton did in OUR Oval Office in OUR White House was only his and Hillary’s business. But when a Conservative Republican woman comes onto the scene as a VP candidate, suddenly her daughter and her daughter’s boyfriend’s sex life is EVERYBODY’s business, and Larry King has to ask the moronic Levi Johnston whether they had sex in the Palin house!
But we should be used to double standards and even worse by now…
And there's one more thing. All of the Bush haters always ask "Why didn't we go after Iran?"
"Why didn't we go after North Korea?"
"Why didn't we go after Hezbollah?"
1. How do they know we're not, but not immediately through head-on military confrontation?
2. If Bush had gone after one of these other entities, the left would have just as strongly opposed that too. I doubt anyone will ever admit it, but they don’t hate Bush because of the war: they're against the war because they hate Bush. I'm waiting for the first who is honest enough to admit that.
3. So what they're suggesting is that after Pearl Harbor, instead of island hopping, MacArthur should have gone berserk and just attacked every single Japanese stronghold at the same time, regardless of the limited forces at his disposal. Is that right? Because that really IS what they're saying with this ridiculous question.
Similarly, instead of pushing through North Africa and up through Italy, and then finally assaulting fortress Nazi Europe at the beaches of Normandy, Ike should have attacked everywhere at once and just unleashed a whirlwind of attacks with whatever limited forces HE had at his command.
So where do you start... Let's not start with the biggest and baddest bad guy in the Middle East, one who is only still in power because he agreed to some conditions which he immediately began to ignore and who already has a 12 year record of defying UN orders. NO!!!
...and they accuse us of throwing darts at the Mid-Eastern dartboard to determine who to go after.
But let’s be real; the sad fact is they HATE George Bush, and they would oppose ANYTHING he tried to do (and they have), and they would hate him NO MATTER what he tried to do (and they do). They give him absolutely no credit for a single thing he did right, or for which they would have showered accolades on any Democrat President for having done.