Was Iraq Worth It?

By Tony Blankely over at RealClearPolitics.

Fighting and winning always impress. Even merely fighting and persisting impress. Shortly after the fall of Soviet Communism, I had dinner with a then-recently former senior Red army general. He told me that the Soviets were astounded and impressed by the fact that we were prepared to fight and lose 50,000 men in Vietnam, when the Soviets never thought we even had a strategic interest there. They thus calculated that they’d better be careful with the United States. What might we do, they thought, if our interests really were threatened?

The full effects of the vigorous martial response of President Bush to the attacks of Sept. 11 will not be known for decades. But if history is any indicator, military courage, persistence and a capacity to kill the enemy in large numbers usually work to the benefit of such nations.

On Sept. 10, 2001, many Islamists thought America and the West were decadent, cowardly and ripe for the pickings. (Hitler thought the same thing about us.) On the basis of President Bush’s political courage — and supremely on the physical courage, moral strength and heartbreaking sacrifice of all our fighting uniformed men and women (and un-uniformed intelligence operatives) — America’s willingness and capacity to fight to protect ourselves cannot be doubted around the world. This may prove to be the most important global political fact of the first decade of the 21st century — with implications even beyond our struggle with radical Islam.

It is time to reconsider whether President Bush or Barack Obama was right on whether to fight. Obama has had a good political run on the early and inconclusive evidence. As victory starts to emerge in Iraq, more persuasive data begin to fall on President Bush’s side of the argument. This is a debate worth having before November.

I’ve said from the beginning that time will prove the wisdom of hitting our enemies, in Iraq and Afghanistan and everywhere else they are hiding in the world, after 9/11. I’ve said Bush, much like Reagan, would be judged better than he is now after a decade or so when cooler heads prevail. That’s a long ways off still, but even now you can see people slowly coming around. The liberal main stream media has pretty much stopped reporting on Iraq – a sure sign things are going well. Barrry Obama doesn’t talk about the Iraq war much, mostly because he looks weak when compared to McCain on foreign policy issues in general and defense in particular, but also because he knows the surge has worked and he was on the wrong side of it. Also, the old “Bush lied, people died” line has been proven to be a lie, so only the most rabid anti-war nuts are still shouting it out to whoever is still listening, and fewer and fewer people are listening.

The fact is people, and nations, respect strength. They abhor weakness. And ever since the Vietnam War America had been showing nothing but weakness. So it is no wonder our enemies thought they could attack us and we would do nothing past a Tomahawk missile up a camel’s ass.

They were wrong. 9/11 awakened the “sleeping tiger,” to use a WWII phrase. We have when we need to, the “willingness and the capacity to fight” and both our friends and enemies know that now.

That is a good thing.

The decision we have in November is whether we want to retreat from this position of strength back to one of weakness and appeasement.

McCain offers the former. Barry the latter.

It’s a simple as that.

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