As I watched the last of the U.S. active military force pull out of Iraq on August 19, I could not help but notice the famed “Indianhead” patch that unit was wearing on their uniforms because long, long ago, I wore that patch, the emblem of the Second Infantry Division.
Most people are likely unaware that 30,000 of the Division are in South Korea, some sixty years after the truce was declared, ready to repulse the first wave of attack if North Korea is crazy enough to try again.
Let’s just say it. George W. Bush was right!
He was right to invade Iraq and remove a psychopathic dictator from control of that nation, a man who had spent eight years at war with Iran, who had invaded Kuwait, and who, if the Israelis had not blown up a nuclear reactor being built there, would have had a nuclear weapon with which to threaten the entire region.
When Saddam Hussein wasn’t busy gassing hundreds of Kurds to death, his prisons were filled with hundreds of Iraqis and he happily filled mass graves during his thirty years of appalling tyranny. When they held “elections” there, he got 99.9% of the vote.
Iraq was as good a definition of Hell as present day Iran.
It’s true that no weapons of mass destruction were found after the 2003 invasion, but even Saddam admitted that he purposely made sure that everyone thought he had them. The intelligence community believed he did and George W. Bush believed he did.
Bush could read a map. Smack dab in the middle of the Middle East is Iraq. It borders Iran, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan, Syria, and a small part of Turkey. You don’t have to be a general to know that, strategically, Iraq militarily holds the key to the Middle East.
An Iraq in the hands of Saddam Hussein, his two vile sons, and the rest of the criminals around him needed “regime change” and George W. Bush provided it. He held firm and he believed his “surge” would work. He was right.
As wars go, the casualties sustained were modest. You can do comparisons with other modern conflicts and history will bear out that our troops inflicted a lot more hurt on the enemy than they did on us. We lost troops to the lowest form of guerrilla warfare, roadside bombs.
We demonstrated that a robust democracy, set upon the goal of removing a cancerous, threatening regime in an unstable region, could make history the way it has always been made; by sending in the troops.
The troops that left Iraq did so because, during his final years in office, George W. Bush negotiated their withdrawal with the Iraq government, one that had been democratically elected by the people of Iraq. Well before Barack Hussein Obama arrived in the Oval Office, their departure had been put in motion.
All through the 2008 election campaign Obama could not bring himself to admit that George W. Bush was right about the decision to invade, to remain, and to surge troops in to quell the insurgency.
For eighteen months we have had to listen to Obama blame Bush for everything and the voters have concluded that George W. Bush was right.
The only thing Barack Hussein Obama wants to do is run away. He wanted to get out of Iraq. He wants to get out of Afghanistan.
The American military, though, will remain in Iraq for years to come. Some 50,000 troops are there to “train” the Iraqi army and police forces. The American military is still in Europe sixty-five years after the end of World War Two. The American military is still in South Korea. It has missions all over the world and the world is a safer place because of it.
George H.W. Bush who fought in World War II knows that. George W. Bush who served in the Texas National Guard knows that.
Barack Hussein Obama, who was a Boy Scout in Indonesia, does not.
© Alan Caruba
