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As the U.S. House of Representatives last week was engaged in a full day of debate, from all perspectives, on our presence and our mission in Iraq, I was reminded of the observations English philosopher John Stuart Mill made about war and the people who fight them on our behalf. Mill said, "War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. A person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of ever being free unless those very freedoms are made and kept by better persons than himself."
Those "better persons" are our nation's veterans and American soldiers now on the ground in Iraq and elsewhere in the world. Lessons in history say, no matter how you feel about this war, we must support every man and woman in uniform. And I believe there is wide spread bipartisan consensus in Congress and throughout America for that. It's also important to remember that over half of the Democrats in the Senate and almost half the Democrats in the House voted to remove Saddam Hussein from power. Many of them are saying now this is a mistake and we shouldn't have done it, but the truth is they supported this military action because Saddam Hussein was a tyrant.
But if we look at the history, if we look at the horrible toll in human lives the Iran-Iraq War wrought, if we look at the invasion of Kuwait, if we look at Hussein’s genocide of hundreds of thousands of people - nearly 150,000 of his own people were gassed when he used weapons of mass destruction against them – no logical person can say this man did not need to be stopped. Senators John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Ted Kennedy and all the leading Democrats in the country took to the floors of Congress and stated that Iraq under Saddam Hussein was a global threat that had to be addressed, and we did. And now they're all saying it was a mistake.
The timeline of terror against us, though, goes back to 1979. There were about 30 incidents between 1979 and 2006 where terrorists have taken action against American targets around the World and then domestically on February 26th, 1993 they hit the World Trade Center the first time. They wanted to bring it down, but they didn't do it the way they had planned it to happen. So they came back again in 2001 and brought the towers down with the worst domestic attack in the history of our country on September 11th. I know that is in a way separate from what's going on in Iraq and many people cling to that argument as the reason Saddam Hussein should have been left alone. But it is still Sunni extremism on the rise that is being exported out of the Middle East around the Word and it is growing.
The insurgents in Iraq today are from Syria, they're from Iran, they're from all around the World and they are fueled by Islamic extremism and part of the al Qaeda terror network working to destroy us. You can't bury your head in the sand and believe that if we weren’t in Iraq, acts of terror wouldn’t be committed against the U.S. by these people. President Clinton buried his head in the sand after 1993 and ignored the threat, cut the intelligence budget 30 percent, and frankly, we paid a price. And now President Bush, rightly, is on the offensive against al Qaeda and Sunni extremism with a bold plan to bring some democratic processes to the Middle East. And it is a bold plan – some people think it is not doable - but it could change the World. Twenty-two Arab countries need freedom; they need to understand what it means, because free countries don't war with each other.
Premature withdrawal in Iraq is not an option, it's an effective surrender. We are there and we must stay the course. It is difficult and the sacrifices are extraordinary, but this is an all volunteer force and they're willing to do it on our behalf. We should thank them and honor them, not retreat in any way, shape or form. Our country cannot afford to surrender. We cannot afford to prematurely withdraw from the Middle East. We need to be engaged today in the World and September the 11th proved that to us.
People who think that September 11th can’t happen again are not paying enough attention to the World environment and the fact that Sunni extremism is on the rise with or without our presence in Iraq. It's not like they were just going to go off and disappear after September 11th, that's just unrealistic. We should be worried about the fact that they are actively looking for another sovereign nation from which to operate. That's what they wanted in Iraq after Afghanistan - a sovereign nation from which to operate with impunity - and there are some chaotic situations in the Northern part of Africa right now; in the Sudan and Darfur, where I'm concerned they may try to set up shop. After all, Bin Laden was originally located in Sudan before he went to Afghanistan.
As Mill’s observations bring home, getting and maintaining freedom is tough work. Only a few men and women out of the masses on this planet are willing to do it for the rest of us, and we're grateful to them. But while Iraq is costly – each one of us hurts individually and feels pain as a nation every time we lose a man or woman - it's important that we stand firm and that we finish what we've started. The World must see that we are going to honor our commitments to the people of Iraq, to the people of the Middle East, and that we actually believe in freedom enough to fight for it. |
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