Iraq

I wrote this on July 2, 2007. The only place I posted it was my refrigerator because I didn’t want to be a source of discouragement to friends in the military. I have since learned that Ron Paul, who voted against going into Iraq and wants us to get out of there immediately, gets support from a greater number of people who are in the military than any of the other presidential candidates. So….following are my thoughts on Iraq:

When we first went into Iraq, I wondered “what about bin Laden?” while at the same time I was happy to see a country become free from the rule of such a cruel man as Saddam Hussein. I did wonder why it was an undeclared war even though most of Congress voted in favor of it. I thought at least this way all the people who hate us and want to fight with us could just go right on to Iraq and we could just get this over with in one spot.

Later, when no weapons of mass destruction were found, and no evidence that any existed was found, we were reminded of the convoys of trucks that were leaving Iraq and pouring over the border into Syria. I didn’t understand why we didn’t secure the border in the first place. Now we will probably never know for sure if he had them, which is why we invaded. I would imagine that since the IED’s that are used are from Iran (so they say) and no weapons of mass destruction have been used on us, that Saddam Hussein was bluffing so his neighbors wouldn’t invade and take his country away from him.

When things weren’t going well, the war planners and others in charge said they didn’t know all these people would come from other countries to fight us there in Iraq. I thought that was the idea! Then I really began to lose my confidence in our leaders. How come a housewife can figure this out and they missed it?

Now what we are hearing is that we are going to cities where insurgents are holed up and we’re flushing them out and we are blocking their escape routes this time so they can’t run off to other cities like they did before. What?! We didn’t block off their escape routes the first time? Nope. We didn’t and they ran like cockroaches. Well, what did they expect? This is the whole secure the border idea on a much smaller scale.

I wonder if our military folks are resting on the laurels of previous generations of great planners and strategists?

I have decided that I am not in favor of preemptive strike at all and I will never support another undeclared war. We need to bring our military home from all over the world and we need a missile defense system here and not in Europe. We need our military here. Let the soda-sipping-American Troop-hating South Koreans get up off their lazy duffs and get out of the soda shop and defend themselves.We don’t need to be a Welfare Defense Service for the whole world. Let our troops come home and defend our borders! If we want to train Iraqis to secure a border why are we taking our best guys off our border and sending them to Iraq? Let the Iraqi soldiers come here and watch and learn. I am totally fed up.