Rudyard Kipling"
“When you're left wounded on Afganistan's plains and
the women come out to cut up what remains, Just roll to your rifle
and blow out your brains,
And go to your God like a soldier”
General Douglas MacArthur"
“We are not retreating. We are advancing in another direction.”
“It is fatal to enter any war without the will to win it.” “Old soldiers never die; they just fade away.
“The soldier, above all other people, prays for peace, for he must suffer and be the deepest wounds and scars of war.”
“May God have mercy upon my enemies, because I won't .” “The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.
“Nobody ever defended, there is only attack and attack and attack some more.
“It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.
The Soldier stood and faced God
Which must always come to pass
He hoped his shoes were shining
Just as bright as his brass
"Step forward you Soldier,
How shall I deal with you?
Have you always turned the other cheek?
To My Church have you been true?"
"No, Lord, I guess I ain't
Because those of us who carry guns
Can't always be a saint."
I've had to work on Sundays
And at times my talk was tough,
And sometimes I've been violent,
Because the world is awfully rough.
But, I never took a penny
That wasn't mine to keep.
Though I worked a lot of overtime
When the bills got just too steep,
The Soldier squared his shoulders and said
And I never passed a cry for help
Though at times I shook with fear,
And sometimes, God forgive me,
I've wept unmanly tears.
I know I don't deserve a place
Among the people here.
They never wanted me around
Except to calm their fears.
If you've a place for me here,
Lord, It needn't be so grand,
I never expected or had too much,
But if you don't, I'll understand."
There was silence all around the throne
Where the saints had often trod
As the Soldier waited quietly,
For the judgment of his God.
"Step forward now, you Soldier,
You've borne your burden well.
Walk peacefully on Heaven's streets,
You've done your time in Hell."
On
the tenth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, the back-and-forth
recriminations continue, but in all the “not me” defenses, we have
forgotten, over the ensuing decade, the climate of 2003 and why we
invaded in the first place. The war was predicated on six suppositions.
1. 9/11 and the 1991 Gulf War. The Bush administration made
the argument that in the post-9/11 climate there should be a belated
reckoning with Saddam Hussein. He had continued to sponsor terrorism,
had over the years invaded or attacked four of his neighbors, and had
killed tens of thousands of his own people. He was surely more a threat
to the region and to his own people than either Bashar Assad or Moammar
Qaddafi was eight years later. In this context, the end of the 1991 Gulf War loomed large: Its
denouement had led not to the removal of a defeated Saddam, but to mass
slaughter of Kurds and Shiites. Twelve years of no-fly zones had seen
periods of conflict, and the enforcement of those zones no longer
enjoyed much, if any, international support — suggesting that Saddam
would soon be able to reclaim his regional stature. Many of the
architects or key players in the 1991 war were once again in power in
Washington, and many of them had in the ensuing decade become remorseful
about the ending of the prior conflict. The sense of the need to
correct a mistake became all the more potent after 9/11. Most Americans
have now forgotten that by 2003, most of the books published on the 1991
war were critical, faulting the unnecessary overkill deployment; the
inclusion of too many allies, which hampered U.S. choices; the shakedown
of allies to help defray the cost; the realist and inhumane ending to
the conflict; the ongoing persecution of Shiites, Marsh Arabs, and
Kurds; and the continuation of Saddam Hussein in power.Since there was no direct
connection between Osama bin Laden and Saddam, take away the security
apprehensions following 9/11, and George Bush probably would not have
taken the risk of invading Iraq. By the same token, had the 1991 Gulf
War ended differently, or had the U.N. and the NATO allies continued to
participate fully in the no-fly zones and the containment of Iraq, there
likewise would not have been a 2003 invasion. The Iraq War was
predicated, rightly or wrongly, on the notion that the past war with
Saddam had failed and containment would fail, and that after 9/11 it was
the proper time to end a sponsor of global terrorism that should have
been ended in 1991 — a decision that, incidentally, would save Kurdistan
and allow it to turn into one of the most successful and pro-American
regions in the Middle East. 2. Afghanistan. A second reason was the rapid
victory in the war in Afghanistan immediately following 9/11. Scholars
and pundits had warned of disaster on the eve of the October 2001
invasion. Even if it was successful in destroying the rule of the
Taliban, any chance of postwar stability was declared impossible, given
the “graveyard of empires” reputation of that part of the world. But the
unforeseen eight-week war that with ease removed the Taliban, and the
nonviolent manner in which the pro-Western Hamid Karzai later assumed
power, misled the administration and the country into thinking Iraq
would be a far less challenging prospect — especially given Iraq’s
humiliating defeat in 1991, which had contrasted sharply with the Soviet
failure in Afghanistan. After all, in contrast to Afghanistan, Iraq had accessible ports,
good weather, flat terrain, a far more literate populace, and oil —
facts that in the ensuing decade, ironically, would help to explain why
David Petraeus finally achieved success there in a manner not true of
his later efforts in Afghanistan.Since the U.S. had seemingly succeeded in two months where the
Soviets had abjectly failed in a decade, and given that we already had
once trounced Saddam, it seemed likely that Iraq would follow the
success of Afghanistan. History is replete with examples of such
misreadings of the past: The French in 1940 believed that they could
hold off the Germans as they had for four years in the First World War;
the Germans believed the Russians would be as weak at home in 1941 as
they had seemed sluggish abroad in Poland and Finland in 1939–40. Had
Afghanistan proved as difficult at the very beginning of the war as it
did at the end, the U.S. probably would not have invaded Iraq. National Review
