The past few days, leading up to the Feb 16 debate on the Iraq war in congress has been an eye opener. The Democrat wing of congress has been planning to play both ends in order to appear to be doing something while actually not committing to any thing. I have noted they want to maintain their base "anti-war" crowd as well as chip away at the center, "we were for the war, but now it's too costly and confusing, but we don't want to lose" that cost them the last Presidential election. They are desperately trying to craft their message towards the 2008 Presidential Elections, while selling out the Troops, the Iraqi people and our allies in the region.
It's not just the Democrats. There are some Republicans that are willing to sell their (R) and their valueless souls in order to maintain their split constituency back in the home state.
There are no principles on Capitol Hill, just manouvering while our soldiers continue the mission and children are murdered by one group or the other.
The press paints all as "sectarian" fighting, trying to redefine the fight as a "civil war" while the President gives uninspiring speeches on why we should continue to the fight.
Is it any surprise the American people are thinking that this is no longer a war they should be involved in or worried about?
The entire time, very few even mention that Al Qaida is in Iraq and active.
The entire Capitol Hill is a giant snake pit of copperheads willing to sell out everyone for political position.
Rep. Murtha (D) Pennsylvania recently outlined the Democrat strategy: "slow bleed". Now that the Dems have control of the major military funding committees, they hope to limit available forces and funding to the military in Iraq by introducing individual bills that try to enforce extended times between deployment for units and individuals, try to limit the number of times a unit or individual can be deployed and limit the period of deployment.
All of which is to force the military to make do with fewer and fewer troops on the field who would still need to perform the same jobs, still be in the same danger, but would not have the amount of force protection to insure their safety or perform the mission. There is only one outcome to this strategy and it is a forced "redeployment" of troops. Lets call it what it is, a forced retreat that will mean more death and injury for our troops as it is slowly strangled by the snakes in congress.
It is not hard to understand how that will occur. It is a fallacy to believe that this "reduction" will force a depletion in missions thus keeping our troops out of harms way. To believe that is to completely misunderstand or purposefully ignore the types of missions that would still have to occur in order to supply our forces that will still be in theater as well as support the Iraqi Army and police, even if they were in a position to stand up in the manner and number necessary to do the job our forces have been doing.
Our troops are out routinely sweeping the roads for IEDs, watching for ambushes and doing reconnaisance. None of which goes away because we have "reduced" the number of troops in the field. We will still have forces in theater who will still need food, clothing, medical supplies and many other needs. Most of that comes via the roads and convoys. All of which are made safer by the aggressive patrolling of our forces who find and dismantle over 50% of all IEDs. Forces, who by their presence in the area, keep the heads low of any enemy who want to plant more IEDs.
If they are stuck on their bases because they do not have appropriate force protection, who will insure that they are not cut off from supplies or from back up by quick reaction forces by IED laden roads, ambushes and other tactics that would quickly leave individual bases vulnerable and thus huge numbers of our forces?
Worse yet, these units know they will need to protect their perimeters and have projected force into the area in order to defend themselves and keep from being attacked or over run by enemy forces, enemy forces organized and led by the continuing presence of Al Qaida that would like nothing better than to see our forces confined to bases where they can be attacked with impunity (as seen from the attack on Abu Graihb Prison).
It is only by continuing presence patrols that these enemy forces cannot gather enough men or in one place without being found and quickly eliminated. If our men can no longer leave the wire, they will not be able to maintain this security and will be vulnerable to mass attacks that will result in mass casualties.
At the same time, they denounce the Iraq forces as incapable of standing on their own, demand that they stand on their own and, simultaneously, imagine that these Iraqi forces will be able to maintain such security as to not put our men in jeopardy.
The entire purpose is to make the military's position untenable in Iraq and force the generals to abandon the strategies that protect them, protect the main population of Iraq and maintain its tenuous hold on democracy and unity. The military would then be forced to report that it was unable to continue the mission and the President would be forced to withdraw our forces or see a total disaster take place in the face of base bound forces.
In such a way, they hope to force retreat, but not call it retreat. They will simultaneous claim to be protecting our forces and saving the military while making the same vulnerable in the extreme with the very likelihood of increased casualties from IEDs, ambushes and straight on attacks.
Rep. John Murtha (news, bio, voting record) of Pennsylvania, tasked by Democrats to direct the next step, says his approach "stops the surge, for all intents and purposes," and would "force a redeployment — not by taking money away, by redirecting money."
News to Rep Murtha, that is the same thing. If you redirect it from the troops in Iraq, then they do not have it. That is taking it away. Only a fool would be fooled by such double speak. The Democrats have a habit of likening Iraq to Vietnam, but this is the closest "Vietnamization" of Iraq you can get. That is exactly what was done to force the troops home: redirecting the money to pay for flights home instead of ammunition and deployment of reserve or replacement troops.
Former Rep. Martin Frost, D-Texas, said Democrats have made a "very clear point" this week by putting the House on record against Bush's troop buildup and now must be careful not to overplay their hand by seeking to cut off funding or limit deployments right away.
"They don't want to be a scapegoat for the Bush administration's failures," Frost said. "This is Bush's war, and there should be no confusion about who's war it is, and Democrats should not set themselves up to have that done to them."
As if this entire war is about the twisted play of politics on the hill. It is only thus because the Democrats made it so.
They are not principled enough to say that they will not vote for the next war budget and demand retreat. Instead, they want to be like snakes crawling through the grass, striking from behind and then crawling away so they can pretend they are not responsible for the outcome, whether that is the death and injury of our troops, the death that will surely come en masse for the Iraqi people and the disintegration of Iraq and the region.
The venomous calculation that it takes to pretend to care about our troops, to care about the Iraqi people or be serious about national defense while zig-zagging through the morass of public opinion in order to establish a tenable position for the previous election and the next, is, frankly, astounding.
Make no mistake, there will be bleeding, but it won't be the figurative "slow" bleed of congressional support, funding or reduction of available forces.
It will be the massive bleeding of our troops blood, the blood of the Iraqi people and the blood of many other people in the Middle East as our "slow bleed" leaves them vulnerable to the expansion of unchecked Islamist terrorists back into the surrounding countries. Many of which have been our allies providing intelligence to track down terrorist, stopping terrorists within their own countries and insuring the flow of vital resources to this nation, no only to enable continuing military activity in Iraq AND Afghanistan, but to insure our economy remains stable and even flourishes.
The Copperheads aren't just Democrats. On
February 14, Congressman Ric Keller (R - florida) gave a speech in which he likened Iraq to a neighbor that is unwilling to mow his own grass:
Let me give you an analogy. Imagine that you have a next door neighbor who refuses to mow his lawn, and the weeds are up to his waist. You mow his lawn for him every single week. The neighbor never says thank you, he hates you, and sometimes he takes out a gun and shoots at you.
Under these circumstances, would you keep mowing his lawn forever? Would you send even more of your family members over to mow his lawn? Or, would you say to him, you better start mowing your own lawn or there’s going to be serious consequences for you?
This is what passes for intelligent thought on the subject. Iraq is not our neighbors "lawn" that needs to be "mowed". It is, in fact, a volatile country that is not simply presenting "unsightly tall grass" and driving down the value of neighboring property. That is the most you can expect from your neighbor's "unmowed grass".
From an uncontrolled and disintegrating Iraq you can expect that Iraqis will die en masse from the creatures crawling around it's "unmowed lawn". You can expect that Iraq's neighbors will be killed and made unstable from this "unmowed lawn". You can expect that these creatures will be building nests from which they can strike you and your neighbors, quite likely killing you; killing the people of the United States and any number of people around the world.
For this ignorant analogy alone, Representative Keller should be driven from Congress like the copperhead that he is.
Rep. Murtha recently stated that, when we leave, the Shia will drive al Qaida from Iraq. He leaves out the details of how that will play out. The Shia, long persecuted in Iraq and the victims of much of the violence from Al Qaida dominated attacks, will not only drive Al Qaida from Iraq, but many, many Sunni who are not involved and not responsible. There will be death on a scale not yet seen in Iraq for all the lamentations of the current conflict and its toll. While many scream of genocide regarding Darfur and lament the inaction of Rawanda and the delays of Kosovo, true genocide will again take place in Iraq. This time it will be the Sunni who pay, regardless of their affiliations or lack of.
But, not before the conflict expands as Sunni Arabs around the Middle East run to the rescue of their persecuted co-religionists. The battles will be repugnant in their barbarity. We cannot pretend we do not know as we have seen the results over and over again in the slaughter houses of Fallujah and the bullet riddled bodies in the streets of Baghdad. No one involved in this battle will ask who is "innocent" or try to stem the blood shed. They will truly force every person within the nation to take sides as the battle escalates and the barbarity goes beyond cruel.
Those that go to join the Sunni in defending themselves will be quickly swept up into al Qaida organized brigades and affiliations. For all the moaning about the number of terrorists "created" by our presence in Iraq, the number that will be easily recruited and assimilated into these organizations will be beyond comprehension.
Finally, when Rep. Murtha's one truly cognitive point comes true,
where will the millions of refugees go? Where will these tens of thousands of more Al Qaida trained, financed and indoctrinated fighters go?
The refugees will go into neighboring countries where they will become an overwhelming economic and security burden on many of our allies such as Jordan and Saudi Arabia. It is also unlikely that, once tasting blood, brutality and embibing the religious ferment of al Qaida that these fighters will simply return back to their countries with no further danger. They will be rightly able to claim that the United States abandoned the innocent Sunni, along with the relative few that are culpable, to be murdered and driven out by vengeful Shia and allowed Iran to dominate the region.
There will be no need for conspiracy theories on the Arab street. It will play out for them on Al Jazeera in graphic detail. If we are worried about the "Arab street" now, it takes little to imagine the kind of hatred that will be generated after the oncoming slaughter and political instability.
By this and the foment sown by the al Qaida indoctrination, there is little stretch of the imagination to understand that the backlash will reach back into the United States. They will be even more driven to attack the US, its allies and vital resources that could result in death and injury to our citizens as well as a collapsing economy from the cost of energy resources to the restriction of all types of goods that traverse the waterways of the region.
To simply buy Rep. Murtha's pronouncement as an effective strategy is beyond stupendously ignorant.
Finally, our allies as well as our enemies will be shown that we cannot be trusted when we give them our hands in friendship, pledging defense. We will have shown, once again, that we weigh the cost to benefit ratio heavily in favor of our own political posturing while the lives and the freedom of our allies are considered less than a thistle on the wind.
When we abandon Iraq, it will not be simply ceding control to the Iranians or ceding territory to terrorist organizations, but we will have ceded a valuable position that has allowed us to offer protection to nascent democracies in Eastern Europe and break away republics from Russia.
What will we offer to them? A handshake on one hand and a copperhead in the other?
To paraphrase Congressman Keller, our neighbor's grass does need to be mowed, but our neighbor is not 9000 miles away. Our neighbor is in Washington DC and his overgrown lawn of crab grass and weeds has been hiding a snake pit full of copperheads. They need to be driven into the open so their venomous fangs can be seen as the danger they represent.
Because everybody knows, Copperheads Kill.
-Out with the copperheads! The only acceptable outcome is Victory over the Islamists!
Cross referenced at
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