And I’m back!

Appreciate the rest of the fellas posting some great stuff while I was away up in Seattle to watch the Seattle/Tampa Bay football game with buddies.  I’m now up in BC Canada visiting my folks with the wife and will have a bit of time to rant away as I usually do. 

I still haven’t fully digested the fantastic Ron Paul posts the guys put up that received the usual great response from the nuts…doh!  I mean the "real conservatives." 

So I was traveling all day yesterday and was only able to hear bits and pieces of General Petraeus testimony but I read all about it today and it sounds like he did a great job.  Mike did his usual great post on the testimony here which I urge you to check out.  The fact that the General issued a balanced report, not too rosy nor too bad, shows that he is a realist.  There are many areas that need more improvement but overall we are most definitely moving down the right path. 

At the outset, I would like to note that this is my testimony. Although I have briefed my assessment and recommendations to my chain of command, I wrote this testimony myself. It has not been cleared by, nor shared with, anyone in the Pentagon, the White House, or Congress.

As a bottom line up front, the military objectives of the surge are, in large measure, being met. In recent months, in the face of tough enemies and the brutal summer heat of Iraq, Coalition and Iraqi Security Forces have achieved progress in the security arena. Though the improvements have been uneven across Iraq, the overall number of security incidents in Iraq has declined in 8 of the past 12 weeks, with the numbers of incidents in the last two weeks at the lowest levels seen since June 2006. ….

Beyond that, while noting that the situation in Iraq remains complex, difficult, and sometimes downright frustrating, I also believe that it is possible to achieve our objectives in Iraq over time, though doing so will be neither quick nor easy.

That last point needs to be said over and over and over again.  There will be bumps in the road, some large and some small, but we are a nation of problem solvers.  It should not be in our nature to take the easy way out and run like cowards.  The left forced us to do this in Vietnam and they are trying the best to do it now but thankfully we have a true leader in the White House who makes the tough decisions and doesn’t back down from unpopular decisions.  He could very well pull us out and his polls would skyrocket.  Republicans would be riding high just in time for the next election.

But at what cost?  For generations to come the US would be known as a nation of cowards who run in the face of adversity.  We made a promise to the Iraqi’s that we would be there for them until they can stand on their own.  Promises need to be kept.  And with Bush’s Grant running the show now we have a smart and capable leader who can improvise and adapt to those bumps that will pop up in the future.  There is no reason why we should run against men strapping themselves with bombs and killing innocent people.  No reason at all.  And with Bush in office we won’t.

But there will be detractors and this morning George Will was riding the defeat train.  He wrote a surprisingly weak article today with very weak arguments on why The Surge has failed.  One reason?  Because Bush visited Anbar instead of Baghdad:

Before Gen. David Petraeus’s report, and to give it a context of optimism, the president visited Iraq’s Anbar province to underscore the success of the surge in making some hitherto anarchic areas less so. More significant, however, was that the president did not visit Baghdad. This underscored the fact that the surge has failed, as measured by the president’s and Petraeus’s standards of success.

It’s actually shocking at the weak thought process by someone as smart as Will here.  He visited Anbar because last year everyone said it couldn’t be won.  Anbar was the hellhole but we fixed it.  Why in the hell wouldn’t Bush visit that area?  If Bush had visited Baghdad instead it appears Will would have written that the Surge was a failure because Anbar was still out of control.  What kind of logic is this?

Meanwhile Will does acknowledge that there has been a decline in violence in Baghdad but like Schumer before him he basically says its DESPITE the US troops efforts:

But even if violence is declining, that might be partly because violent sectarian cleansing has separated Sunni and Shiite communities.

Yeah, couldn’t be due to the new strategy or the fact that the Iraqi army has evolved into a capable army…..no, it’s because the Sunni and Shiite’s have killed each other off…..sigh.

Another very weak argument by Will in this line:

What "forced" America to go to war in 2003 — the "gathering danger" of weapons of mass destruction — was fictitious.

Wrong!  The WMDs that Saddam had were not made up, he used them for pete’s sake.  Every intelligence agency in the world believed he had them.  There has been evidence that much of the WMD he did have was moved when we gave him that year long advance warning of our invasion, which I doubt will ever be proven but thats neither here nor there.  There was no "one" thing that forced us to invade Iraq rather it was a conglomerate of facts. 

• Iraqs refusal to abide by the cease fire
• Iraqs refusal to allow WMD inspectors into the country
• Iraqs support of terrorists, including those who attacked America
• Iraqs continued aggression against the US including plotting to kill a former President and the firing of AA at our aircraft.

There were many reasons to invade Iraq but the main one being the fact that in a post 9/11 world a dictator who thumbed his nose at the world and supported terrorists could not be allowed to stay in power.  It would have been criminal to allow the status quo to continue.

Hell, it was only after the invasion did we learn the extent in which Saddam enriched himself via the Oil For Food program.  Imagine if we had left him alone and those sanctions had been allowed to lapse, just imagine how powerful this man would have been. 

Instead he’s six feet under, along with his sons and thousands of al-Qaeda.  Some of the baddest of the bad are now dead and that my friend, is a good thing.