If bringing the troops home signals Victory, then isn’t World War II and Korea still going on?
Let’s be clear. Victory over the military forces of Iraq occurred in 2003. It was won by President George W Bush. The subsequent insurgent War in Iraq ended in 2007-2008, and that too was won by George W Bush, after he successfully launched the Surge in 2007. Total American casualties in Iraq prior to and during the Surge were 4221, and since, during Obama’s watch, 258. So no, Obama hasn’t won anything in Iraq.
And he has no right to declare a victory which occurred while he was still a state senator in Illinois.
For the Record:
American troops are still quartered in Japan, 61 years after Japan was restored to the worldwide community as a democracy. Likewise, American troops still stand sentinel in Germany 60 years after half of that nation could rejoin the world community as a democracy, and even twenty years after the Soviet Union fell, removing any short term strategic need for US forces to remain there.
Finally, the US continues to maintain troops in South Korea, also a democracy, as part of an on-going United Nations command, as a deterrent against North Korean aggression.
Contrary to one of the points (I think there are others) on which Barack Obama and Ron Paul agree, America is not in those places today as an imperialist power and conqueror, but rather as ally at the behest of the host nations. I spit on any suggestion to the contrary.
In diplomatic parlance, it’s the best of both worlds for the United States, when 1) they want us to be there, and 2) we need to be there on national security grounds.
We would leave if the hosts had only asked.
They haven’t.
But it is not this way in Iraq, for the Iraqis want us to stay, only our leaders don’t want us to. We didn’t really want the Iraqis to ask us to stay, and have even cornered them into a deal-breaker over the status of American soldiers’ rights of immunity in combat ( a common SOFA, Status ff Forces Agreement clause) which a first year diplomacy student at Harvard’s Kennedy School could have negotiated had we really wanted to negotiate the point. Instead our State Department folded its hand.
The fix was in.
World War II ended in 1945 and does not still go on, as Barack Obama’s vision of victory seems to indicate. Had America followed his criterion and simply brought all our troops home and declared Victory as Obama has done….this
…instead of this…
…would be the fate of the world, for all of Europe today would be speaking Russian as a second language, all of Japan would be speaking Mandarin, and all of South Korea would be starving just like their kinsmen to the north…
…and 472,000 American men would have died for no good reason.
What we are seeing is a bug-out in Iraq, and no ticker tape parade and “job well done” speechifying by Barack Obama can mask this reality.
What Mr Obama, in fact, declares is an abdication of our post and our (not his, never forget) victory, meaning that the likelihood that 4500 Americans may have died needlessly is great indeed…and that over 30 million Arabs, instead of struggling to build a democracy, will fall back into living under the boot of tyranny…meaning perhaps, Americans will once again have to rescue them…because, Ron Paul, we are the only country in history who will ask its sons to lay down their lives for their neighbor. But only if Iraq is very lucky, and we are lucky to pass the torch onto new leadership, rather than allow our country yet again to be darkened by quislings who hide behind liars’ mouths, as a previous generation of Democrats did in sending over a million southeast Asians into genocide and another 12 million into slavery.
We’ll revisit this again in the spring, but within a year, Sayyid Muqtadā al-Ṣadr, as a surrogate for Iran, will try to have Iraq in full scale civil war, with Kurds in the north fighting to prevent Turkish annexation, and Shiites in the south fighting Sunni in the west and Baghdad. (I blame George W Bush, and not Barack Obama that al-Sadr is even alive.)
I won’t presume to know Obama’s crack team of strategists’ hearts here (Mrs Cass Sunstein), but the fact that they have worked for two years in lining up, like duck pins, Israel’s left flank with three, count ’em, three Islamo-fascist states, suggests they may also not be very happy with any sort of independent, democratic Arab nation on Israel’s right.
It’s just a thought, and in fact, Israel may not even have anything to do with it at all, as I smell an odor of antipathy for any kind of democracy in the region by this regime, unless you spell it “demokratik repooblik”…or as my Balkan friends call it, “imperial kommonism.”
For those of you who say you really don’t like Arabs, pray for them anyway.
