Ladies and gentlemen, I'm Duncan Hunter, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. And I'm joined by my colleagues today to make some comments regarding the recent congressional initiatives that would call for an immediate pullout of American forces from Iraq.
You know, American military operations have two phases. In the attack phase there's great patriotism, there's a groundswell of support for the troops and much flag waving.
The second phase is a more difficult phase. That's a time when you have casualties. That's the time when you make incremental gains. And it's a time when you sometimes see faltering political support. That always happens. And right now in the war-fighting theater in Iraq, we're in the second phase.
Okay, the second phase Hunter is referring to is the nation building phase, and the only time it is more dangerous than the first stage is when you totally fuck up the first stage. In fact, the first stage is not yet complete. We are still fighting it because, unfortunately for us, the Iraqis did not dutifully line up in tight formations on the battlefield to be blown to bits. Much like a group of rag tag revolutionaries did in this country 230 or so years ago, the inferior force resorted to guerrilla warfare. It has been the standard playbook when fighting a superior force ever since then. The fact that the planners of this war didn't take that into account is the reason we're in this mess to begin with. Well, that and the fact that we never should have been there in the first place. Let go back to Hunter's statement.
And I thought that we would talk a little bit about what's at stake, because I think that the attack on 9/11 is something that Americans have not forgotten, and I think they understand that the aggressive operations of America's military have helped to keep the insurgents in the war against terror off balance.
That's why Americans today are able to go to parks, go to schools, go to the grocery store, live life without fear of having a second 9/11 attacks, and that's why four years have expired without a second attack on our homeland: because we've aggressively projected America's fighting forces in the theaters in Afghanistan and Iraq, and they are doing a superb job.
Yep, gotta drop in a couple of 9/11 references when deflecting criticism about a completely different war. The bottom line is that both these paragraphs are complete horseshit with the exception of the Afghanistan mention. The war in Iraq has nothing to do with keeping our homeland safe from terrorists. In fact, what we've managed to do is create the greatest terrorist training camp in the world. Iraq is now a laboratory where terrorist can test new methods soon to be exported to other parts of the world.
Also, it is important to remember that just because our homeland hasn't been attacked, our allies have, lest we forget Madrid, London, Amman, and Bali. Hunter had one other thing to say that interested me.
And we are in the process of delivering a free Iraq and delivering a nation that will be, instead of an enemy of the United States, a friend of the United States in a very strategic area of the world, that will not be a platform for terrorists, that will have a modicum of democracy and therefore not be a threat to the United States.
As soon as they are able to, the Iraqis are going to throw us out of the country. It is going to be simply impossible to get elected in a new "free" Iraq having a pro US stance. That's the danger of creating a democracy where we are hated.
That being said, John Murtha is also wrong. The danger here is not in repeating the mistake of Vietnam. It is in repeating the mistake of 1980's Afghanistan. Once the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan, we basically threw the Afghanis to the wolves. Of course, other factors made it difficult to continue aid such as the untimely death of Pakistan's leader Zia-Ul-Haq in a 1988 plane crash and the KGB blowing up one of our arms warehouses in Pakistan. But, the reality is we left Afghanistan to become a failed state. How did that work out for us? Oh yea, thirteen years later some assholes flew some planes into some buildings. (I highly recommend reading Charlie Wilson's War for more information on the covert 1980's CIA operations in Afghanistan.)
We can't let Iraq become the same thing, but what are our current real-time options. First of all we need to commit enough force to Iraq to make the population restive. I can only come up with three ways to accomplish this given that our military is becoming increasingly battle weary. The first is obviously to have a draft. Not gonna happen with presidential approval ratings in the thirties. Members of Congress like being members of Congress and approving a draft puts you in the fast lane out of town. The second is recruit foreigners to replenish our ranks. Bad idea, leads to a clusterfuck of a military. The third, and in my opinion the best option is to play a high stakes game of chicken with the UN. Tell them to give us 150,000 troops next month or we are going home. This isn't going to happen either. So, there are no military options available to us except for Bush's policy of staying the course. He doesn't seem to understand that we can't keep on fucking up and expect a conclusion to our liking just because we are Americans.
The other option is to allow the free elections and let the Iraqis expel us. Once we're gone, there will probably be an extremely violent civil war with the Madhi army siding with the Sunnis to go against the Badr Brigade and the pro-Iranian Shia. The ugly reality is that we are going to have to pick a side and arm them though a third pass though country. And we're going to have to hold our nose while the ethnic cleansing takes place. We're also going to have to whack a few guys, it's going to be messy. Then we're going to have to live with whatever government the winner sets up. Probably a pro-Iranian theocracy. We have to try to make nice with them which will be hard because unlike Afghanistan, they won't need our money, they have oil. We are also going to have to lean on Turkey not to intervene when the Kurds withdrawal from Iraq to form their own country.
Hopefully, we will not all feel the scalding steam blast from the pressure cooker that George Bush foolishly opened.
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