To that end, Iraq must be stabilized and many more of the enemy there must be killed. That includes Muqtada al-Sadr, and his reported 60,000 militia men. We must break the spirit of the militant Islamists by reigning down fire and brimstone upon them. They respect nothing else. We are currently seen, in the words of bin Laden, as a weak horse and/or paper tiger, unwillingly to accept casualties. As it stands now we are not actively taking the fight to the terrorists in Iraq. The ISG would have us do less. The esteemed men and women of this Blue Ribbon panel would have us fight this war as Vietnam in reverse. We would now, after three and a half years of fighting in Iraq, remove the main combat forces and embed advisors with Iraqi troops. After all, goes the argument, "the Iraqis have been training for three years. American soldiers are routinely deployed to combat after several months of training." That neglects the fundamental strength of the US military; namely the Non-Commissioned Officer corps. When I joined the 7th Infantry Division (Light) as a fresh-faced 18 year old straight out of Basic and AIT, my squad leader had six years service under his belt. My platoon sergeant had 14 years service to his credit and my 1st Sergeant had twenty. All three were combat veterans. Every platoon cadre was similarly comprised of, to my young eyes, crusty, old veterans. Most of them were younger then, than I am now, but they seemed so old. They inspired respect, and not a little fear. Human nature is to seek cover, or run away from the sound of gunfire. Surviving close combat demands just the opposite. Only the respect for, and fear of, a seasoned veteran can instill the instinct required to over-come basic human emotion. The Iraqi army does not have that cadre of leadership yet. You can make a soldier in a few month's time, but you cannot make a leader without years of experience. NCOs are experts because they have made more mistakes than the average soldier, and lived through it. They therefore know what not to do.
As of yet, there is also no banking system to speak of in Iraq . This means soldiers, upon receiving their pay, must return to their home towns to deliver the money to their families. At any given time no combat unit is at full strength. There are also infiltrators in their midst. By some accounts, 20-25% of recruits are terrorist sympathizers at best, and terrorists themselves at worst. The purging of the Baath Party left a power vacuum, and nature, abhorring a vacuum, filled it. Unfortunately for us, those that filled it were not always to be trusted. Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki is thus in a more than dangerous position. In addition, he receives contradictory messages from our leaders. President Bush has absolutely no intention of removing combat troops until the region is stabilized, but his political adversaries would have us bring them home now. Maliki therefore, cannot go after al-Sadr because if American troops are brought home precipitously, al-Sadr's militia may be the only thing left to keep him alive. Daily, Maliki receives mixed messages on our intentions. CNN, and The New York Times scream for immediate withdrawal. Faced with uncertainty from the US, Maliki has retreated into tribal allegiance with the only Shiite leader strong enough to prevent the Sunni insurgents from rolling over the country. Seen in that light I ask, what would you do? Iran and Syria have fomented the violence by arming and supporting terrorists on both ideological sides. This is mainly because Iranian President Amadinejad seeks the return of the Mahdi; the Koranic savior who can only return after the world is thrust into Armageddon. It matters not if we believe in the Mahdi's return, Amadinejad does, and is openly attempting to hasten his return. Al-Sadr's militia, Jaish al-Mahdi, the Army of the Mahdi, highlights exactly how confusingly opaque the entire situation is.
So, what are we to do? Numerous sources have screamed that the military is nearly broken, over-extended and in a deep malaise. None of those things are true. Young men do not volunteer for combat arms jobs thinking they will not go to war. As a 17 year old I volunteered for the infantry, when I was offered every job available. My grandfather and father, both former infantrymen, tried to talk me into Flight School, to no avail. So it is with the current crop of soldier and marine. Their average age is 20. They could not have volunteered before they were 17, so they knew for what they were volunteering; if not exactly the specifics. They knew war was in the offing and gladly accepted that mantle. The Army and Marine combat arms units are also re-enlisting at higher rates than normal. Recruiting as a whole may be down some, but it is by no means dismal, nor dire. So, neither morale nor malaise would seem to be anywhere, but in the minds of those who are safe here in the US. As for being over-extended no such thing is true. We do need more combat troops, but that has always been true. In the last months of World War II Gen. Patton's Third Army had around 350,000 men, but no more than two battalions of infantry in reserve. It was the same on all fronts. All available infantry units, as was the case then, need to be utilized, and that includes the National Guard and Reserves.
The National Guard is just that, a national guard. The National Guard has fought in every war since the American Revolution. The militias that battled the British at Bunker Hill, Concord and Lexington were overwhelmingly part-time soldiers, and the ancestors of the present Guard. Ask any liberal what he thinks about the 2nd Amendment and he will tell you that it was meant for the militia, or our current National Guard, not individuals. How then can anyone say the Guard should not be deployed in a combat role? It either is the direct offspring of those storied militias of the Revolutionary War, or it isn't. Since the 18th century the National Guard has been deployed to bolster active duty units. It is their primary mission. Flood relief and other state calamities are tertiary goals. They are called the National Guard because they guard the nation first, and serve at the discretion of the Commander in Chief. They should not take the lead when Regular Army units are available, but they should fight. Do not get me wrong, I am not in favor of deploying hundreds of thousands of troops to Iraq. I agree with Gen. Abizaid that troops in that large a concentration would provide too many targets and too large a footprint. In fact, I am not even in favor of a surge unless they will be allowed to do what they are constituted to do. War is a messy business, undertaken by hard men. It means fighting, and that means killing, and, yes, dying. We must recognize that Americans will die, but more will die, with no result, if we allow the present conditions to persist. In historical context, in just over three months fighting 90,000 men were killed during the Battle of the Bulge. It is the nature of war that a full out assault on your enemy causes less casualties than letting the foe pick the time and place of battle. The enemy always gets a vote, but it should not be the only vote, nor the most advantageous one for him.
We must take the fight to the enemy. Currently that arena is primarily Iraq. Instead of worrying about an "exit strategy" we should concern ourselves with a very simple plan: We Win, They Lose. The comparisons to the time spent fighting WWII are sophistry, at best. There was no exit strategy in December 1944, in fact Eisenhower and his staff were hoping the war would be over by 1946, or 1947. They had no idea of an "exit strategy" because nothing but utter, total victory would suffice. It is the same now, but too many of us do not recognize it. Our enemies are, in the words of Winston Churchill, a gathering storm. If we do not defeat them, and defeat them decisively, in Iraq it will be nothing more than a matter of time before the free world is lost. It may not be that the US will succumb in our lifetimes, and it will not be due solely to force of arms. Our financial markets are globally connected in such a way though, that our enemies can, and will, collapse our economy, gleefully, if given the chance. The US, for good or ill, is the world's economic hyperpower, so if our economy falters the entire world is impacted. Nothing would cheer our jihadist enemies more than to have another Great Depression visited upon us. The way to prevent that is to take the fight to the jihadists whenever we can, and wherever they are. That means al-Sadr in his mosque, if necessary. The jihadists use mosques liberally when it benefits them, and scream bloody murder when we defile them. We must refuse to accept that as legitimate. If they wish to trumpet Geneva Convention rights for armed combatants we should remind them that those same conventions make exception for the destruction of holy places when they are used as battlements.
We must also continue to export that which is best about us. What's best about us is not McDonald's cheeseburgers and Britney Spears CDs. What's best about us is our true, unassailable love of freedom, and the belief in our fellow man. We cannot negotiate our way out of this fight, and we cannot fight it piecemeal. We must fight it aggressively, brutally, with no quarter asked, and none given. Only then, as has always been our practice, can we disband our democratic warriors and let them come home to lead their lives. That is what democracies have always done. For better or for ill, we are now the pre-eminent democracy and we cannot, should not and must not do anything but defeat the evil extremists loose in the world. This may not have been the best time to fight this fight, but then again it is seldom the right time to fight. Had the jihadist proliferation in the region been left unchecked, we would have had to fight this battle by 2020, or 2025 anyway, and with an assuredly more horrific cost in human lives. And to those who would say we are creating terrorists and causing a proliferation, I say two things: 1) If that were true we would have created Nazis by killing them in WWII and, 2) good, they are congregating in a place where we can kill them more effectively, and with less loss of American life.
In his book, The Soul of Battle, Victor David Hanson, quotes a passage from former World War II Supreme Allied Commander, and President of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower's memoirs, "Daily as it [the war] progressed there grew within me the conviction that as never before in a war between many nations the forces that stood for human good and men's rights were this time confronted by a completely evil conspiracy with which no compromise could be tolerated. Because only by the utter destruction of the Axis was a decent world possible, the war became for me a crusade in the traditional sense of that often misused word." As Hanson further notes, Thomas Macauley once wrote, "the essence of war is violence, and that moderation in war is imbecility." In the same book Hanson references a speech by Lt. Gen. George S. Patton to his troops in 1944, when absolute victory in World War II was anything but assured, "We'll win this war, but we'll win it only by showing the enemy we have more guts than they have or will ever have." Those three men belong to a different time and age, but their words resound now with urgency. In fact, were I to remove the names and the Axis reference, and simply attribute Hanson's research, most would be hard pressed to differentiate them from the battle in which we are now engaged. That is the point. The battle which currently threatens to consume us is one of time immemorial, namely democracy versus evil. No ideology, once aroused, is as dangerous to its enemies as a democratic nation, because free men know exactly what they stand to lose. I can only hope that we still have the time, and wherewithal to wake up. We did not choose this fight, no matter what some may say, but we must win it. Peace in our time is only possible through a military victory. To paraphrase Churchill, we can no longer, feed the crocodile in the hopes that he eats us last.
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