Sunday, January 16, 2005
The Breeding Ground
Last Thursday two seemingly unrelated news reports achieved a kind of harmony that served to spook a lot of people. These were the release of CIA's National Intelligence Council "2020" report, and the news that 17 congressional Democrats from California had sent a letter to President Bush, urging our departure from Iraq.
MSM managed to distill (read: editorialize) from the NIC report that Iraq has become a "breeding ground" for new terrorists. The direct implication is that if it were not for our efforts there, many fewer terrorists would be in production right now.
The California Democrats, under the leadership of the notoriously liberal Barbara Lee, urged the president to make all haste to extricate America's servicemen and women from Iraq.
But wait just a cotton pickin' minute. Even if Iraq has become a breeding ground for terrorists, where else would we want such a thing to be going on? Is it not to our advantage to have our enemy swarming precisely where we can get to them with our military arsenal? By contrast, and in retrospect, it was extremely dangerous to have terrorists training in Afghanistan, under the protection of the Taliban, for many uninterrupted years in the 1990s.
This point has seemingly been lost in all the hand-wringing over our "stirring up a hornet's nest" in the Middle East. We could hope for no better tactical situation than that our presence in the region has these hornets riled up and swirling around our deadly military. For every terrorist that survives, even if his proficiency is improved, there are dozens of his kind who are merely dead.
Also missing from this one-sided assessment of the situation is the fact that our own military, tested daily in this asymmetrical fight, is improving its operational capability at a very rapid pace. If Iraq has turned into a breeding and training ground for terrorists, our forces are gaining a mighty proficiency in their own right.
No greater folly can be imagined than to pull out of Iraq now. How can these 17 members of Congress, and their fellow travelers in government, media and academia, think that we could avoid the worst possible outcome if we pulled out now? What delays the end state, and escalates the costs of our continued presence in Iraq, is the imposition of limitations on our ability to act decisively against the enemy on the ground. And it is precisely this effect that the sanctimonious seventeen have with their capitulation drivel.
MSM managed to distill (read: editorialize) from the NIC report that Iraq has become a "breeding ground" for new terrorists. The direct implication is that if it were not for our efforts there, many fewer terrorists would be in production right now.
The California Democrats, under the leadership of the notoriously liberal Barbara Lee, urged the president to make all haste to extricate America's servicemen and women from Iraq.
But wait just a cotton pickin' minute. Even if Iraq has become a breeding ground for terrorists, where else would we want such a thing to be going on? Is it not to our advantage to have our enemy swarming precisely where we can get to them with our military arsenal? By contrast, and in retrospect, it was extremely dangerous to have terrorists training in Afghanistan, under the protection of the Taliban, for many uninterrupted years in the 1990s.
This point has seemingly been lost in all the hand-wringing over our "stirring up a hornet's nest" in the Middle East. We could hope for no better tactical situation than that our presence in the region has these hornets riled up and swirling around our deadly military. For every terrorist that survives, even if his proficiency is improved, there are dozens of his kind who are merely dead.
Also missing from this one-sided assessment of the situation is the fact that our own military, tested daily in this asymmetrical fight, is improving its operational capability at a very rapid pace. If Iraq has turned into a breeding and training ground for terrorists, our forces are gaining a mighty proficiency in their own right.
No greater folly can be imagined than to pull out of Iraq now. How can these 17 members of Congress, and their fellow travelers in government, media and academia, think that we could avoid the worst possible outcome if we pulled out now? What delays the end state, and escalates the costs of our continued presence in Iraq, is the imposition of limitations on our ability to act decisively against the enemy on the ground. And it is precisely this effect that the sanctimonious seventeen have with their capitulation drivel.
# posted by mds : 3:17 PM
