Staying the Course in Iraq

Fire of Liberty

You've got to hand it to President Bush and his most recent trip to Baghdad to meet with PM Maliki and our outstanding soldiers earlier this week. For one thing it showed our soldiers that even with all the violence within Iraq and members of the media and Congress calling for a withdrawal from Mesopotamia, and weakened poll numbers, their Commander-in-Chief is still committed to our soldiers finishing the job they started. I can assure you our soldiers don't want to book-it out of Iraq and give up on the mission because . They have a great sense of honor and won't let their compatriots die in vain because others in D.C. can't stand the heat. (One can only imagine what would have happened during the dark days of WWII had FDR rolled into his office and said enough is enough or had President Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon or Reagan had done the same with regards to the Cold War against the Soviets.) From the cheers coming from our soldiers when the Prez showed up at the auditorium in Iraq, they're damn proud of the man and believe in staying the course until victory is a hand. Even more, the visit also bucks up PM Maliki and his government in their efforts of creating a stable and democratic society. Just think about it, the President didn't sit in the comforts of D.C. to meet the PM or wait for a state visit but he went to Iraq to meet the leader of Iraq. As with other eastern cultures, the people see a big-time leader like President Bush coming to see this new leader as a sign of great respect and shows the host as being someone who isn't a puppet of the US but his own man. All in all, President Bush has achieved a tactical as well as a strategic victory in Iraq in the past two weeks with the death of Zarqawi and his visit to Iraq.

Now while Iraq is a long way from being yet another Switzerland or Japan it still has come a long way what with a military force of 130,000 US troops and a President who is willing to staying the course in Iraq.(No matter how people ridicule the simplicity of stay-the-course, they fail to realize that the White House, the Pentagon, Central Command and the individual units in the field adjust their posture and efforts based on conditions and matrixes in real-time than a deadline 6 months or a year down the road) I'd say that the efforts on behalf of our forces and the Iraqi government/security forces are coming along quite fine based on past fights against insurgents(Philippines and Malaya).