Steel, Steel, Steel

Fire of Liberty

Here's a good piece by Brendan Miniter over at The Wall Street Journal's free site OpinionJournal.com (registration required) on why the call for the US to withdraw from Iraq is probably one of the worst policies that could have ever been devised. Whether it's Senator Joe Biden making speeches and appearing on Face The Nation publicly questioning the President's policy or even Representative Harold Ford Jr. calling out the Defense Department or The White House on Iraq, you can clearly see individuals promoting their own agenda rather than the interest of this nation. Ford and Biden should realize that they are in the same boat with the President because they voted for the War and shouldn't think about bailing when water gets choppy. Instead of Harold Ford Jr. focusing on his Senate run in 06 and Biden looking ahead to 2008 Prez run, maybe the should back away from rhetorical buffet and look at the big picture. Luckily, Minter puts the whole concept in the following paragraphs:

Outside Israel, and to a lesser extent Turkey and Lebanon, democracy is something new in the Middle East. So as we struggle now to keep a lid on the violence, it's hard not to get demoralized with the notion that it's not possible to build a civil society because the region has always been mired in the kind of chaos it finds itself in now. But that, of course, isn't true. Afghanistan may have always been on the edge of the world, but Iraq once enjoyed a relatively wealthy and well educated middle class. In Iraq, civil society began a steep decline only after Saddam Hussein hijacked the country. Iran too was once home to a burgeoning educated class, but that was before the revolution. Beirut was the "Paris" of the region, with the wealth and sophistication to match, before civil war destroyed the city and the country. The region began its breakdown thanks in part to Soviet pressure, and now, Islamofacists have outlived the communists. The end results are the same under either system--poverty, oppression and aggression toward the West.

President Bush made the case to invade Iraq mostly on the basis of weapons of mass destruction. The stockpiles everyone thought the U.S. military would unearth have not been found. But the danger of a failed and chaotic state headed by a madman in the center of the Middle East stands. Saddam clearly had designs on acquiring all sorts of weapons, and he was a walking WMD because his very hold on power was leveling efforts to restore civil society. What we needed in Iraq was not a dictator to keep the lid on the chaos, but a society with cops, troops and intelligence officers going after al Qaeda operatives. Empowering Iraqis to choose their own leaders will give us that because democracy is the antithesis of the chaos in which terrorists thrive.

It's easy to squawk and squawk about the negative aspects of Iraq to gain political points and beat up on President Bush but it makes you a stronger person to weather the storm and put some steel in the nation's reserve to push our soldiers to their goal. Haven't these Senators and Congressmen read enough history to realize that division of a nation during war is certain to lead to ruin and our enemies are betting on this.