There is no clear cut mission in Iraq and other myths

There is no clear cut mission in Iraq and other myths

The DC Guy
January 13, 2006

This is going to come out of left field, but I'm getting really sick and tired of listening to the screed against the war. It only took one phrase on one of the talking head shows to set me off. "There's no clear cut mission in Iraq."

I'm going to debunk that statement along with three other common fallacies on the Iraq war.

There is no clear cut mission in Iraq?
No clear cut mission? Let me lay it out for you. After taking out Saddam, the mission is as follows:

Defeat the insurgents
Close down any Al Qaeda connections
Establish a viable democracy in Iraq
Train the Iraqi military to be able to handle domestic law enforcement and local defense

And that's just from memory. This stuff has been stated over and over again Bush, Cheney, Rice, and Rumsfeld speeches since the war started.

If I was at sea, and my DivO (Division Officer) told me to go fix the engine, I'm not going to ask him "why". I'm not going to say "are you sure about that? Isn't there something else I could be doing?" I'm not going to say "I really don't think it's a good idea to fix the engines, I should go fix the radar instead".

Of course not. Why? Because he's my superior officer and he's giving me an order. All I've got to know is that he's got the authority, and it's a lawful order. Anything else is his responsibility, not mine.

Everyone - not just those in the military - is put into positions where they have to do things they may not agree with. That's life. Unless you're the lead dog, the scenery never changes.

The war in Iraq is no different. Even if every single person in the US military thought that going into Iraq was stupid and a bad idea, they would still have to go because that decision is not theirs to make. It takes the burden for developing policy off their shoulders and lets them focus on what they do best - killing people and breaking things.

Everything else is the job of the politicians.

It's not a war we should be fighting?
More than 2,000 people have died because the decision was made that removing Saddam Hussein was in the national security interests of the United States. They died doing their jobs with their boots on. There's nothing more we can ask of them.

The US should involve itself in any situation where our own national security is at risk. When the entire world thinks that Saddam has WMDs, there's clear evidence that he's a destabilizing force within the region, has started wars of aggression and used WMDs in the past, and is actively harboring terrorists and supporting terror organizations, that's enough reason for the US to get involved.

Diplomatic methods were exhausted through UN embargos on Iraq since the last Gulf War. That didn't stop Saddam from brutally repressing the southern Shiites, taking post shots at US planes in the UN sanctioned no-fly-zones in the northern and southern parts of Iraq, or plotting to assassinate George H.W. Bush, either.

Whether or not Iraq actually possessed WMDs is immaterial - that wasn't the only reason we went to war. Just because that reason was the most dangerous and got the most press coverage does not mean that because we were wrong (thank God) it invalidates every other reason we had to invade.

The US is there just for the oil?
This nonsense that people keep talking about us going in there to take the Iraqi resources is infuriating. If you're going to claim something, at least do a little homework. We haven't seen a drop of free Iraqi oil come out of this war.

But what about "real" threats like Iran and North Korea?
Why do we allow other dictators to do the same things Saddam did? Simple. Because there are too many people out there with the discredited isolationist belief that we shouldn't interfere in the internal politics of other countries.

North Korea is not a direct threat to us or our interests at this time, and is being effectively contained by Japan, South Korea and China. Japan and South Korea have both benefited from our economic and military support over the years. If Kim Jong-Il was sponsoring global terror and there was no other way to ensure he didn't hurt anyone else, the US would go in and take him out. At that point, it would be in our national interests.

The truth is there's nobody in the Middle East that could have solved the Iraq problem. The US was it. So we did. Second-guessing that decision is pointless. The decision has been made. We've been there for almost three years now. At this point, we've got to accomplish the mission, and retreat and defeat are not options.