2005 Soap Box Archives

Portable War 11/28/05

We hear a lot of people these days who draw analogies between the war in Iraq and the war in Vietnam, and there definitely are some.

Both were fought in strange, foreign lands against cultures
we don’t really understand. There were no designated battlegrounds and both were fought to some extent in populated areas.
In both you couldn’t tell the enemies from the friendly because they both look exactly alike, within many cases, no uniform to differentiate between the combatants and the noncombatants.

Both enemies were cunning and hard to find, blending into the population and had no problem at all killing their own people.

Yes you could sit around and draw analogies between the two wars but somewhere along the way the analogies stop and the
huge differences between the war in Iraq and the one in Vietnam
have to be pointed out and the most glaring difference is this.

When we pulled out of the Vietnam war we flew away and left the war thousands of miles away. If we pull out of Iraq before the job is done, this war is going to follow us home and explode on the streets of every free country on the planet.

Can you imagine the encouragement a complete pull out in Iraq would give to the already inflamed Islamic terrorists?

After all a free Iraq does not suit their purposes at all and terrifies the other despotic Muslims in the area.

America would only leave another job unfinished, like the first time we took Saddam down and didn’t completely destroy him.

I have also heard that we had Saddam contained and that he was no danger. The problem with that train of thought is that we didn’t have him contained. If so why was he getting billions of dollars from the scumbags who corrupted the oil for food program?

And just what do you think he was doing with all that money? He certainly wasn’t spending it on food. And with a nuclear loose cannon like Russia involved there is no telling just what kind of weapons he could have obtained and used.

The major argument is that he had no WMD's but you’d have a hard time convincing the Kurds of that. He most certainly had
poison gas and I believe he had a whole lot more and probably moved them into Syria to avoid discovery, knowing that the war was coming.

We should not be blinded by what the politically motivated politicians say who think that we should pull all of our troops out of Iraq immediately. One reason being that it would dishonor the American lives which have been lost there and accomplish absolutely nothing.

Another glaring reason is that these people have no answers. They have no plans, they simply go around spouting off about bringing the troops home, but they have no idea what to do after that.

The truth of the matter is that if we do an immediate withdrawal of the troops in Iraq, we’ll never be trusted again by any nation.
If we leave Iraq without establishing the democracy that most Iraqis desperately want, we may as well retire from the world stage, our word would mean nothing and our prestige even less.

If we want to see our troops brought home soon, and we all do, we need to take the politics and the media out of the equation and leave the war to the military. I have a feeling it would be over soon.

We can fight the terrorists there or we can fight them here, but make no mistake about it, we will have to fight them.

Pray for our troops.

What do you think?

God Bless America

Charlie Daniels

 

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