Yes, I'm at GodBlogCon, but the news is the news. Ralph Peters had a column yesterday in the New York Post about his take on how we can win more decisively in Iraq. His assessment of Iraq's Prime Minister is sobering.
Now [President Bush is] standing up for Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki - a man who has decided to back our enemies.
I lost faith in our engagement in Iraq last week. I can pinpoint the moment. It came when I heard that Maliki had demanded - successfully - that our military release a just-captured deputy of Muqtada al-Sadr who was running death squads.
As a former intelligence officer, that told me two things: First, Iraq's prime minister is betting on Muqtada to prevail, not us. Second, Muqtada, not the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, is now the most powerful man in Iraq.
Peters has a straightforward answer:
For now, Maliki and his pals are using our troops to buy time while they pocket our money, amass power and build up arms. But they've written us off for the long term.
Does that mean we should leave?
Not yet. Iraq deserves one last chance. But to make that chance even remotely viable, we'll have to take desperate measures. We need to fight. And accept the consequences.
The first thing we need to do is to kill Muqtada al-Sadr, who's now a greater threat to our strategic goals than Osama bin Laden.
We must kill - not capture - Muqtada, then kill every gunman who comes out in the streets to avenge him.
Our policy of all-carrots-no-sticks has failed miserably. We delivered Iraq to zealots, gangsters and terrorists. Now our only hope is to prove that we mean business - that the era of peace, love and wasting American lives is over.
And after we've killed Muqtada and destroyed his Mahdi Army, we need to go after the Sunni insurgents. If we can't leave a democracy behind, we should at least leave the corpses of our enemies.
War is not easy. War is not pretty. War is a barbaric effort to use every weapon necessary to destroy those who would destroy life and liberty. It's well past time to take off the kid gloves and get the job done in Iraq.
4 comments:
As a Christian this is not an easy thing for me to say or admit. But here I go:
It's time we stopped drinking the Kool-Aid. The government leaders who said they support us, our moral values, our belief systems, our well-being, our children's future ... those leaders are not who they say they are. They have lied, they have made bad decisions. This war in Iraq can only be "won" if we bring democracy to Iraqis, and if they don't want democracy than no number of U.S. troops are going to be able to force it on them. We can't "win" in Iraq and we shouldn't be offering our servicemen and women as sacrificial lambs while our national leaders scramble to come up with a plan to save face.
When I told my pastor I wanted to read David Kuo's book "Tempting Faith" he grew adamant, almost angry that I would want to. He said I would be "violating my values" if I did ... that I would be buying into liberal propaganda. David Kuo was a very revered, respected man in evangelical Christian circles while he worked for the White House. Now he's the devil. I worship Jesus, not politicians, so who am I betraying by seeking more information? Information about how our politicians lied to evangelical Christians to get our money and our votes ... they pandered to our faith, they abused our trust, they mocked Christian beliefs in private while they came out in public and told us what we wanted to hear. You can say that David Kuo is a dirty liar and wrote this book for financial gain. But what if he's not? What does that say about all of us, who they manipulated for political purposes?
I can't pretend anymore that what's happening isn't real. I can't go along with the idea that torture is OK or that the war in Iraq was a good idea in the first place or that we're smart to waste our military resources in Iraq when we have other fish to fry, i.e. North Korea, Iran ... I can't drink the Kool-Aid anymore and it makes me feel sad and angry that I bought into what turned out to be a lot of deception.
I don't think any politician currently in office really has the ideals of evangelical Christians in mind when they write public policy. I love my country, but I really have grown to dislike and distrust my government. I don't know what to do.
Tanner,
I'm glad you did the hard thing and posted your comments.
You're right about many things. If the Iraqis don't want democracy, we can't force it on them. Many of our government leaders have lied, and many have made bad decisions (I'll leave it to you to decide which is which).
As for David Kuo's book, I disagree with your pastor that the reading of a book could "violate" your values. But I caution you to read it with a grain of salt.
Here's an editorial from January of 2003, saying that Kuo supported using Faith-Based Initiative money for fighting global warming. If this is true, then Kuo's criticism of the Bush administration for not focusing on "the poor" rings hollow.
http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=30542
As for the Bush administration mocking and manipulating its Christian base, I really don't care. My guess is that the GOP does less of this than the Democrats do to their base of Black voters. "The base" of either side is used by Party leadership and probably have been since the beginning of the party system.
What's most important to me is which party's policies are going to advance the liberty and safety of our nation and which party's policies will set those things back. Which party will promote my freedom of worship and the ability of me to speak out about it, and which party will try to stifle my free exercise of religion?
When I vote, I'm not going to worry about how either party feels about me as a Christian. I'm going to vote based on what I believe they will actually do once they're in office. I don't think that makes me a Kool-Aid drinker. I hope that makes me wise as a serpent, a useful thing in the jungles of politics.
We will never get perfect candidates. We will always have a choice between two disappointing options, and will have to hold our noses and vote for the one who stinks less. But our duty in this country is to vote nonetheless.
I pray you will find wisdom before the election and that it will set your mind at ease.
Thanks for the response Skye. Yes I do plan to vote. But I won't necessarily vote a straight Republican ticket as I have in the past.
My comment is more about the larger "war on terror" rather than the war in Iraq, but I couldn't find a 100% pertinent thread in which to post it so please bear with me.
One thing that struck me as odd in the days after 9/11 was Bush saying "We will not tolerate conspiracy theories [regarding 9/11]". Sure enough there have been some wacky conspiracy theories surrounding the events of that day. The most far-fetched and patently ridiculous one that I've ever heard goes like this: Nineteen hijackers who claimed to be devout Muslims but yet were so un-Muslim as to be getting drunk all the time, doing cocaine and frequenting strip clubs decided to hijack four airliners and fly them into buildings in the northeastern U.S., the area of the country that is the most thick with fighter bases. After leaving a Koran on a barstool at a strip bar after getting shitfaced drunk on the night before, then writing a suicide note/inspirational letter that sounded like it was written by someone with next to no knowledge of Islam, they went to bed and got up the next morning hung over and carried out their devious plan. Nevermind the fact that of the four "pilots" among them there was not a one that could handle a Cessna or a Piper Cub let alone fly a jumbo jet, and the one assigned the most difficult task of all, Hani Hanjour, was so laughably incompetent that he was the worst fake "pilot" of the bunch. Nevermind the fact that they received very rudimentary flight training at Pensacola Naval Air Station, making them more likely to have been C.I.A. assets than Islamic fundamentalist terrorists. So on to the airports. These "hijackers" somehow managed to board all four airliners with their tickets, yet not even ONE got his name on any of the flight manifests. So they hijack all four airliners and at this time passengers on United 93 start making a bunch of cell phone calls from 35,000 feet in the air to tell people what was going on. Nevermind the fact that cell phones wouldn't work very well above 4,000 feet, and wouldn't work at ALL above 8,000 feet. But the conspiracy theorists won't let that fact get in the way of a good fantasy. That is one of the little things you "aren't supposed to think about". Nevermind that one of the callers called his mom and said his first and last name, more like he was reading from a list than calling his own mom. Anyway, when these airliners each deviated from their flight plan and didn't respond to ground control, NORAD would any other time have followed standard operating procedure (and did NOT have to be told by F.A.A. that there were hijackings because they were watching the same events unfold on their own radar) which means fighter jets would be scrambled from the nearest base where they were available on standby within a few minutes, just like every other time when airliners stray off course. But of course on 9/11 this didn't happen, not even close. Somehow these "hijackers" must have used magical powers to cause NORAD to stand down, as ridiculous as this sounds because total inaction from the most high-tech and professional Air Force in the world would be necessary to carry out their tasks. So on the most important day in its history the Air Force was totally worthless. Then they had to make one of the airliners look like a smaller plane, because unknown to them the Naudet brothers had a videocamera to capture the only known footage of the North Tower crash, and this footage shows something that is not at all like a jumbo jet, but didn't have to bother with the South Tower jet disguising itself because that was the one we were "supposed to see". Anyway, as for the Pentagon they had to have Hani Hanjour fly his airliner like it was a fighter plane, making a high G-force corkscrew turn that no real airliner can do, in making its descent to strike the Pentagon. But these "hijackers" wanted to make sure Rumsfeld survived so they went out of their way to hit the farthest point in the building from where Rumsfeld and the top brass are located. And this worked out rather well for the military personnel in the Pentagon, since the side that was hit was the part that was under renovation at the time with few military personnel present compared to construction workers. Still more fortuitous for the Pentagon, the side that was hit had just before 9/11 been structurally reinforced to prevent a large fire there from spreading elsewhere in the building. Awful nice of them to pick that part to hit, huh? Then the airliner vaporized itself into nothing but tiny unidentifiable pieces no bigger than a fist, unlike the crash of a real airliner when you will be able to see at least some identifiable parts, like crumpled wings, broken tail section etc. Why, Hani Hanjour the terrible pilot flew that airliner so good that even though he hit the Pentagon on the ground floor the engines didn't even drag the ground!! Imagine that!! Though the airliner vaporized itself on impact it only made a tiny 16 foot hole in the building. Amazing. Meanwhile, though the planes hitting the Twin Towers caused fires small enough for the firefighters to be heard on their radios saying "We just need 2 hoses and we can knock this fire down" attesting to the small size of it, somehow they must have used magical powers from beyond the grave to make this morph into a raging inferno capable of making the steel on all forty-seven main support columns (not to mention the over 100 smaller support columns) soften and buckle, then all fail at once. Hmmm. Then still more magic was used to make the building totally defy physics as well as common sense in having the uppermost floors pass through the remainder of the building as quickly, meaning as effortlessly, as falling through air, a feat that without magic could only be done with explosives. Then exactly 30 minutes later the North Tower collapses in precisely the same freefall physics-defying manner. Incredible. Not to mention the fact that both collapsed at a uniform rate too, not slowing down, which also defies physics because as the uppermost floors crash into and through each successive floor beneath them they would shed more and more energy each time, thus slowing itself down. Common sense tells you this is not possible without either the hijackers' magical powers or explosives. To emphasize their telekinetic prowess, later in the day they made a third building, WTC # 7, collapse also at freefall rate though no plane or any major debris hit it. Amazing guys these magical hijackers. But we know it had to be "Muslim hijackers" the conspiracy theorist will tell you because (now don't laugh) one of their passports was "found" a couple days later near Ground Zero, miraculously "surviving" the fire that we were told incinerated planes, passengers and black boxes, and also "survived" the collapse of the building it was in. When common sense tells you if that were true then they should start making buildings and airliners out of heavy paper and plastic so as to be "indestructable" like that magic passport. The hijackers even used their magical powers to bring at least seven of their number back to life, to appear at american embassies outraged at being blamed for 9/11!! BBC reported on that and it is still online. Nevertheless, they also used magical powers to make the american government look like it was covering something up in the aftermath of this, what with the hasty removal of the steel debris and having it driven to ports in trucks with GPS locators on them, to be shipped overseas to China and India to be melted down. When common sense again tells you that this is paradoxical in that if the steel was so unimportant that they didn't bother saving some for analysis but so important as to require GPS locators on the trucks with one driver losing his job because he stopped to get lunch. Hmmmm. Yes, this whole story smacks of the utmost idiocy and fantastical far-fetched lying, but it is amazingly enough what some people believe. Even now, five years later, the provably false fairy tale of the "nineteen hijackers" is heard repeated again and again, and is accepted without question by so many Americans. Which is itself a testament to the innate psychological cowardice of the American sheeple, i mean people, and their abject willingness to believe something, ANYTHING, no matter how ridiculous in order to avoid facing a scary uncomfortable truth. Time to wake up America.
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