War votes: What are they good for?

Absolutely nothing.

I'm sure y'all have heard that the House once again spent a week's worth of taxpayer money huffing and puffing to come up with a narrow decision to end the Iraq War and begin bringing troops home. The result of this posturing will be the same as if 20 of us got together and voted to end famine in Africa. Tomorrow.

Ain't gonna happen, folks. They may as well have voted in favor of Neptune moving a tad bit closer to earth.

The President of the United States is also known as the commander in chief. In other words, he's the head coach when it comes to war and our military. He calls the plays. The players don't. And that's all Congress is. Yes, they have the right to cut off funds and not play. The Libs just don't have the collective nads to do so.

So they posture. They run to TV cameras and microphones at every opportunity, which is all they've done for seven years. No wonder their approval numbers range anywhere from 16 to 24 percent. They piss and moan about the war. Six weeks ago, Congress voted in favor of a troop surge with the qualification that certain benchmarks had to be met by OCTOBER.

Guess with amnesty for millions of illegal immigrants (notice how they're called "migrants" now by the media? Wonder when they'll start calling prostitutes entrepreneurs?) off the table, they couldn't wait even half that long. They have no other agenda, after all.

But let's talk about the war for a second. As I've blogged about before, we get about a story a day out of Iraq. Most of the time, the day's story details a roadside or suicide bomb or firefight where a number of Iraqi and/or American soldiers are killed. Now, if the media were covering, say, Waco, Texas, I'd say we have a serious problem in Waco. But we're talking about a freakin' COUNTRY. One would have to assume, based on our wonderful media's coverage of Iraq, that NOTHING ELSE happened today, in an entire COUNTRY.

Imagine if, in World War II, the only "news" coming from Europe was that day's number of American casualties. Wonder how Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi would have dealt with 29 THOUSAND American soldiers dead in less than three months during the Normandy Invasion? Of course, we would have never been part of that, because three years earlier, we lost the Philippines and 2,500 American lives (not to mention more than 100,000 more who became POWs, many of whom died during the Bataan Death March) in five months.

But I regress. What of the Iraq War? Well, as I've also blogged before, the war went swimmingly in my mind. With relative ease, we deposed the late Sadaam Hussein, overran his military (which shattered the French Army's record for fastest modern-day retreat) and installed an interim government. "Mission Accomplished," which the Libs enjoy bringing up with the frequency of the sun rising in the East, was, in fact, mission accomplished.

Here's where we shifted into what I'll refer to as our Oprah Strategy, though.

We ... as in America ... forgot back in 1945 or so what war is. It's nasty. Shit gets broken. People die. But when you take a seat at the table, you play to win, because if you don't, the other guy will. We didn't defeat Hitler's Germany by being nice or civil or anything else. We pounded the living shit out of the Nazis. And when they retreated within their own borders, we continued pounding the living shit out of them. Did the same with Japan.

Guess we and the rest of the world had learned after World War I what treaties were worth ...

Well, we forgot it soon after. We allowed Europe to divide, and what was the result? Anyone remember the Cold War? Or have they stopped teaching that in school, too? Then there was that little "police action" in Korea, where we begrudgingly allowed Douglas MacArthur to go into North Korea but stopped him cold (fired him, in fact) before he could chase the Korean communists into China.

Quick review of that negotiated "peace" ... we still maintain a fairly hefty military presence in South Korea AND we're now dealing with a nuclear-capable communist North. FIFTY-SOME YEARS LATER!

And forget Vietnam. We didn't fight a war there. We placed more restraints on our military in that cesspool than a womanizing alcoholic gambler would find during a week's stay at the Vatican. If anything, Vietnam's lesson should have been that you fight a war to obliterate the enemy however and wherever. THAT is how you win the peace.

But we didn't learn. When Iraq invaded Kuwait, we assembled the biggest, baddest coalition of force imaginable. The Iraqis couldn't run fast enough. But then we stopped. We pretty much walked away. And a decade later? Well, the WORLD knew what Sadaam was up to at the turn of the century, even if the Libs don't want to admit it now. But I've also posted Hillary's and her husband's quotes from the late 1990s, along with what other world leaders (including U.N. officials) said about what he was doing. And, after 9/11 showed us that oceans no longer protect us, we had someone in office who, unlike his predecessor, took an offensive stance.

And yes, I've heard the intellectually vacant argument that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. That wasn't the reason we went in. Next to the Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, Sadaam's Iraq was making a strong bid to become Afghanistan's successor as the world's major staging ground for terrorism.

And it still would become so again ... QUICKLY ... were we to capitulate in our effort to build stability there.

Are things all rosy in Iraq? Of course not. The biggest problem is that we STILL don't know or have forgotten how to fight to win. We're playing by a vast set of rules while our enemy abides by none ... there and elsewhere in the world. We haven't captured/killed the bearded wonder who leads Al Qaida, or any number of the extremist organization's hierarchy, because we don't want to anger poooooooor Pakistan.

Well, know what? Phuck Pakistan. I'm relatively certain that if we had turned that mountainous region where bin Laden was hiding between Afghanistan and Pakistan to dust in late 2001, the media would have focused on innocent civilian deaths, Libs would have called for investigaaaaaaaaations and so forth. But I'm also certain that Al Qaida's strength would not be what it is today and that Pakistan would have happily continued cashing billions of dollars in U.S. aid checks and cleaning up terrorist cells here and there, same as they're doing today.

And why would they? Simple. Because, as the saying with which I was raised went, you phuck with the bull, you get the horn. Same principle exists in Iraq. These militants run into poor Shiite neighborhoods? Or they hide in mosques? Know what? We blow these places to hell and back to get the bad guys ... which is the whole idea here, folks ... fewer Shiite neighborhoods or mosques are gonna house the bad guys!

But we're not fighting a real war here. Ask veterans who were around in the 1940s. We're wearing white gloves and playing nice, so people won't think badly of us. We want to confer rights we give to American citizens on prisoners of this war, whose fate doesn't even fall under the Geneva Conventions because they're not legitimate enemy combatants. (And if you don't believe that, READ the Geneva Conventions). Hell, we treat these captured terrorists ONE HUNDRED times better than any POW in the history of this world has been treated.

But then, we won't even look twice at a 25-year-old Muslim at an airport anymore for fear of racial profiling charges -- brought by him AND a great number of "American" attorneys, politicians and members of the media. But we'll practically strip search the 80-year-old Caucasian grandmother two places ahead of him in line and the 12-year-old Girl Scout three places behind ... because we're serious, by God, about security!

I'm sorry, but know what? Maybe we ought to just throw in the towel. God love the guys and gals in the military who are doing the heavy lifting.

But for what purpose? At least half this country has and never had the will to fight. And we certainly haven't shown, collectively, in a VERY long time the will to do what it takes to win.

(Imported from July 14, 2007)