President Bush is in Iraq, and the troops prove again 1. They love this President B. They believe in the mission III. The Dems are going to take a huge fall in ’08 if they don’t recognize both the worth or the mission and the fact they need to get behind it and start rooting for its success, not its failure. No one has ever won an election rooting for the US to lose a war.
via Hot Air
if you don’t want to watch it all, at least check out this highlight:
You see Sunnis who once fought side by side with al Qaeda against coalition troops now fighting side by side with coalition troops against al Qaeda. Anbar is a huge province. It was once written off as lost. It is now one of the safest places in Iraq. (Hooah.) Because of your hard work, because of your bravery and sacrifice, you are denying al Qaeda a safe haven from which to plot and plan and carry out attacks against the United States of America. What you’re doing here is making this country safer, and I thank you for your hard work. (Hooah.)
…I want to tell you this about the decision — about my decision about troop levels. Those decisions will be based on a calm assessment by our military commanders on the conditions on the ground — not a nervous reaction by Washington politicians to poll results in the media. (Hooah.) In other words, when we begin to draw down troops from Iraq, it will be from a position of strength and success, not from a position of fear and failure. To do otherwise would embolden our enemies and make it more likely that they would attack us at home. If we let our enemies back us out of Iraq, we will more likely face them in America. If we don’t want to hear their footsteps back home, we have to keep them on their heels over here. And that’s exactly what you’re doing, and America is safer for it.
The Surge® is working, and on measurable quantitative levels, and its giving the leftwingnuts another reason to go ape-shit bat-shit rat-shit whiny ass titty baby crazy (as if they needed another).
Lefty newsites try to put the most negative spin possible on the fact that U.S. combat deaths are down by half, but the facts, along with even liberal Democrat congressmen admitting the surge is working, is really driving the far-left, which is heavily invested in the failure of the War for Iraqi Freedom, up a wall.
In the links above, leftwingnuts bend over backwards to give convoluted excuses as to why the surge is working, and why GW Bush deserves no credit for it, and that the MSM better damn well not give him any credit for it. So if the deaths have indeed plunged, what’s your beef, nutroots? Do you insist on a negative headline so that any good news in Iraq is tempered with negativism, so your world-view doesn’t suffer sanity threatening cognitive dissidence?
I’m a Civil War buff. It took Lincoln 4 years, 8 commanding generals and hundreds of thousands of deaths to win a war in which the major battlefields were less than 100 miles from Washington. GWBush is trying to win one thousands of miles across an ocean, in a hostile and foreign culture in a region that has no experience with the Enlightenment that Europeans worked through hundreds of years ago. Basic human rights, modern levels of civil rights and law are unknown to many Iraqis. Its going to take some time. Not in the next 6 months, as some lefties keep crowing some commentator or politician keeps guessing, but probably a decade, or even more.
I personally think its laudable and worthwhile. I think we coddled dictators and brutal tyrants for much too long in the interest of realpolitik or the cynical, racist theory that ‘it takes a despot to control these savages’ and its a waste of time to try to teach them democracy. That’s why the Middle East is in such a mess.
Here’s what some of the soldiers out there have to say:
You’d expect complaints. I didn’t hear one. And talking to three Jersey boys, I was surprised to hear just how positive they felt about the mission.
“I’d do it again in a heartbeat,” Lance Cpl. Justin Blitzstein of West Milford told me. Self-assured and ready for anything, he added, “Anybody who doesn’t think we should be here should see the difference we’ve made in the way these people live. And everybody here’s a volunteer. We want to be here.”
Lance Cpl. Jason Hetherington of Cape May County leapt in, “The progress from us being here [in the police precinct] less than six months is unbelievable. People who don’t think we’re making a difference should just see what we do.”
A thoughtful man, Hetherington paused to choose his next words. “We were surprised that it wasn’t a combat situation in Fallujah anymore. It’s rewarding to see the kids out in the streets and the shops open.”
Blitzstein nodded. “We were amazed at how easy it was when we moved in. We were the first Marines thrown into the meat grinder, right in the middle of Fallujah, but it worked out. It was good planning on somebody’s part.”
President Bush was and is right to stand fast, and even with all the carping from congress, from thousands of blogging lefties and the MSM, in the face of all that, to keep striving for a very noble purpose, that is after all in our interest.
What every happened to the liberal notion that liberty was worth fighting for, worth sacrificing? Fewer Americans have died in Iraq in 4 years than died in one day at Sharpsburg or Cold Harbor, or Iwo Jima.
I think its well worth it, and more. You may be ‘over-educated’ but you do seem ignorant of the Truman/FDR/Kennedy philosophy of liberalism:
“Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”
I’d like to see a moderator in a presidential debate ask any of the current crop of Dem candidates if they still believe that statement to be true, and would it be the policy of their administration were they elected.
Hatips to Jammie Wearing Fool and Jules Crittenden for additional sources. Much more at Memeorandum. Even more from Ed Morrisey