Iraq: A Case For Not Losing

On September 23, 2002, former Vice President Al Gore told the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco that he opposed the invasion of Iraq because he didn’t trust President Bush to stay and finish the job.

If we go in there and dismantle them — and they deserve to be dismantled — but then we wash our hands of it and walk away and leave it in a situation of chaos, and say, “That’s for y’all to decide how to put things back together now,” that hurts us.

That was Al Gore before the war. Today President Bush is being criticized for staying the course. In general, Americans are having a tough time seeing an upside to staying in Iraq any longer.

But have they really looked at the downside to running away?

What would happen if the U.S. pulled out right now? Iraq would erupt in a bloody civil war . . . and anyone who says it can’t get any worse than it already is, has no imagination.

— President Bush speaks of “mass killings on a horrific scale.”

— Wisconsin’s David Obey, Chairman of the House Committee on Appropriations, is one of the Democrat’s strongest proponents of a U.S. withdrawal. But when asked about the violence that would follow such a pullout, he admitted, “I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s horrendous.

Civil war would almost certainly end with a terrorist regime coming to power in a country with the third largest proven oil reserves in the world at their disposal . . . and America would have no more influence there than it does in Iran. Terrorists would have, not only a base of operations, but an almost unlimited amount money with which to fund those operations.

And they would be emboldened.

In May 1995, in a cave in Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden told ABC News reporter, John Miller, how President Clinton’s withdrawal of U.S. troops from Somalia after terrorists killed 18 Army Rangers there, encouraged him and his followers to think of the American soldier as a “paper tiger.”

If Somalia so emboldened them, what would victory in Iraq do?  What happens when an opportunistic enemy smells fear or when a blood thirsty enemy sees blood? They shout and they pursue. They aren’t discouraged, but encouraged. Their forces don’t disband, they grow.

In any war, what happens when one battlefield is taken? The winner goes on to the next and the next until he has accomplished all he wants to accomplish, or is stopped. If his goal is the complete destruction of his enemy, then he pursues that enemy all the way home.

If the forces of human dignity fall in defeat over there, the battle will come here. . . . not just the small battles we’ve seen, but a large well-funded one. And I’m sorry to say it, but even 9-11 was small compared to what could be coming.

As things stand now, a stable, democratic Iraq anytime soon is hard to imagine. The people fighting the U.S. and each other there seem to have nothing else to do with their lives. They may be able to carry this on a long time. This is a tough spot.

Though the present policy in Iraq shows promise, I’m not a military expert and can’t say the best way to win there. But I know how to lose, and before America runs away, it had better consider what losing will mean . . . to the whole world . . . from now on.

Posted: 9-17-2007

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