Are We Still at War?

First of all understand that I supported attacking Iraq and Afghanistan. I sat in on the initial top level planning for the invasion of Iraq, and crossed the border the day war started. I was there when we liberated the City of Urr known by many historians as the birthplace of Abraham from the bible. The stated reasons for the war in Iraq, such as weapons of mass destruction and Iraqi support of the 9-1-1 terrorists was ill founded and will always be a stain on this President.  However, we did attack and subdue a country and a dictator who supported terrorism around the world, had possessed and used weapons of mass destruction and had created wars and destruction all over the Middle East. We did a great and historic thing by removing these people from Iraq, “The Cradle of Civilization.  In Afghanistan we removed The Taliban, who rank as some of the worst humans on earth. We also sent a message to the rest of the world including terrorists and those countries who support them, that we will take military action, and will even remove the leadership of those countries if need be to protect the interests of The United States. That being said, we now need to start talking about how to end the war.

It is encouraging that the current crop of candidates for President are talking about the economy. The economy is a mess. In every corner of America there are For Sale signs sometimes a whole bunch of them on a single block.  But too paraphrase the words of Robert E. Lee, “thank god war is so terrible, lest we grow fond of it”. Well it seems that the country has forgotten we are still at war. In two areas of this world we have around 200,000 soldiers fighting and dying each and every day and they have been fighting this war for over five years. Longer than WWII.

So what is the status of this two front war? Let’s talk about Iraq first. President Bush and Senator John McCain will tell us all that the “surge” has worked and Iraq is now safe, although their lips quiver some when they say it.  Violence in Iraq is down overall and U.S. troop deaths are also down. Don’t forget however that 2007 saw the highest number of U.S. troops killed in Iraq for any year since the war began. To the extreme happiness of our “other” (sic) Middle East allies such as Saudi Arabia, oil production in Iraq is still struggling, and we Americans are still paying record high gas prices. The U.S. taxpayers have now invested around a trillion dollars in Iraq. That is trillion with a “T”. The 600+ million dollar new U.S. embassy building in Iraq is way behind schedule and the large construction projects to repair and rebuild the Iraqi water, electric, sewer and general infrastructure systems are all way over budget and way past their expected completion dates.  After almost five years of supposed rebuilding and training, the new Iraq Army is still reported to be nowhere near capable of even controlling the internal demands of the country. Note, it takes 16 weeks to take a raw recruit fresh out high school in the U.S. and train him to be a fully capable combat soldier in the most sophisticated Army in the world. For some reason we cannot train a new Iraqi Army in five years, that really only has to secure its own country, not defend the free world.  The result is that we sent an extra 50,000 soldiers to Iraq last year to try and stop the violence. I will tell you that in part that plan worked. The problem is we did it four years too late.

 Too little Too late.  Remember when Rumsfeld argued, and argued and argued that we had enough troops in Iraq? Remember when President Bush said if the Generals asked for more troops he would send them?  I said back in 2003, that no General in history ever said “we have enough troops”, they always want more, more, more.  But Rumsfeld knew better. Now five years into this conflict, we send in an extra 50,000 troops when we should have done it much, much earlier and likely ended this war. Now instead we have a stalemate where the President is scared, and I mean that just as it sounds, he is scared to reduce our troop numbers in Iraq for fear that the bad guys, who have been waiting in the wings will come back with a terrible vengeance. Not only have the Insurgents had a several month break to rebuild, rearm and retrain, but they have had five years to grow an entire new group of young recruits for their cause.  For political reasons (getting reelected) Bush did not send more troops in 2004, he will now not bring our troops home for fear of the increased violence in Iraq will give the Whitehouse to the Democrats this November. In both cases our troops suffer through tactical decisions that should have been made based on military science not political science.

Afghanistan is kind of like Korea, “The Forgotten War”. Just as in Iraq, 2007 was the worst year for U.S. soldiers killed in action in Afghanistan and we have been in this theater of operations for over six years. Overall violence in the country is substantially higher than in previous years and is on the rise. Just three months ago the neoconites such as Limbaugh and O’Reilly and the Whitehouse were bragging about the great success of the War in Afghanistan, even though the military community was telling them it was not true. How many of you are aware we extended the tours of thousands of troops and just sent over 3,000 Marines as part of a “surge” force to Afghanistan just last month? Again, Too Little, Too late. Exactly like the surge troops in Iraq, the additional troops in Afghanistan are there to try and keep things as quiet as possible until November, when the Presidential election is over. What a way to fight a war.

So how do we end these wars? The bottom line is it is time for the people of Iraqi and Afghanistan to get off their collective asses and stand up and take care of their own problems. We have given them the tools to do it, but we need to stop giving the blood of our soldiers.

I propose we do a version of “Cut and Run”. In this version we cut out a checkered flag for each of our troops, and we run home with those flags with heads held high for our hard fought victory over the forces of evil. We have won. Then we rebuild our military forces, we rebuild our military families, we rebuild our own economy, and we prepare for our next challenge.