Attack Iraq: Hard and Fast

February 24, 2002

by Bruce Walker

The President has made the right decision: Saddam Hussein must go. How should America go about this task? First, he should ask Congress for a formal declaration of war. The President did an excellent job of laying out the case for an "axis of evil" and he must now force Democrats to go on record as agreeing with him. Declaring war is not the same as waging war, but it is an unequivocal political statement.

The campaign can and should be waged from the air using smart technology and with limited risk of Americans being captured. One of the oddest "complaints" from the Left during the Vietnam War was that America was not fighting fairly. Bombing an enemy was some form of bullying - we were not giving the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese "a fair chance" and we were insulating ourselves from suffering casualties in war. The result? Tens of thousands of Americans came home in body bags and millions of Vietnamese and Cambodians were delivered into regimes just as awful as the Taliban we so deplore today.

War is not fair and it is not nice. Any moral nation waging war should wage it to win, and if the war is not moral, then it should not wage the war at all. This is so very obvious and simple that only the Left could seriously persuade us otherwise.

Desert Storm is often presented as the first example of the post-Vietnam reliance of America fighting a war to win with a minimum of American casualties. Actually, the first such war was the American conquest of Communist Grenada, utterly overlooked these days because it was so successful, so painless, and so historically right. Nineteen years ago, President Reagan ordered our military forces to overwhelm this Carribean Island nation, whose leader was an avowed Marxist with close ties to Castro’s Cuba and the Communist regime in Nicaragua.

The whole war took one day. President Reagan ousted - for the first time in history - a communist government from power. The nation of Grenada held free elections in December 1984, and has been a working democracy ever since. No wonder the whole campaign seems to have fallen into the Left’s infamous "Memory Hole!" Who wants to know about America easily ousting an evil, communist dictatorship at almost no cost and then having the people of that nation rejoice and live happily ever after? Certainly not liberal Democrats.

Nine year later, Desert Storm proved again that America could defeat an evil dictatorship with almost no loss of life if our leaders were prepared to use overwhelming military force with the best technology, the best training, and the best support that our government could provide.

Air power, smart weapons, professional armed forces drawn from free and modern democracies, and resolute moral purpose work very well. We have now proved that in three wars over a period of nineteen years. It is vital that we prove it again.

Why is Iraq so critical? Will Saddam Hussein soon have weapons of mass destruction with the ability to destroy an American city? In time, yes, but that is not the most serious threat. What will we do - what will the civilized world do - if in six months Saddam Hussein can destroy Istanbul with a small nuclear weapon? Turkey is a model of how Islam and free democracy can coexist and it is a vital ally. What if he can destroy Tel Aviv? What if he does destroy Elath, Israel’s port city on the Red Sea, and threatens to destroy Haifa next?

Is this possible in six months? Certainly, but Israel also could retaliate with nuclear weapons and probably kill Hussein. What if in nine months or a year, Hussein can destroy Athens or Naples or Vienna? Greece, Italy, and Austria are not nuclear powers, but their stability is vital to the democratic West. It is not blackmail of America directly, or Britain and France that is the great danger, but real threats to other nations. If Hussein destroys Corinth and threatens next to destroy Athens, what will the Greek government say and do?

This is the danger, and every day that passes with Hussein moving closer to acquiring the power to blackmail the entire region of southeastern Europe and the Middle East with weapons of mass destruction brings him closer to an ability to give a "lesson" to the world, and so chill the spines of western democracies that the pressure to yield to demands like, say, allowing re-occupation of Kuwait will be intense.

Intermediate range ballistic missiles can be stopped - our Patriot missile system showed that in Desert Storm - but the Patriot system cannot stop all types of long range missiles, and Hussein has been given ten years to figure out ways to hit a regional target. If Clinton and his incompetent advisers had invested in a true and comprehensive missile defense system, then redundant layers of defensive systems probably could stop an Iraqi missile. But, of course, Clinton had his mind on more important things than protecting mankind from monsters like Hussein (like protecting mankind from Newt Gingrich).

There is another vital reason for liberating Iraq soon. The defeat of the Taliban had the same important shock value as the overrunning of the concentration camps in Nazi Germany: all qualms or second thoughts about the morality of our actions were permanently laid to rest. Conquering Hussein’s forces would provide an important boost to President Bush’s correct diagnosis of our war against evildoers.

People today are unimpressed by statistics or facts, but they are affected by personal stories and images on the television screen. Bagdad is full of horror stories involving Saddam Hussein. The Kurds of northern Iraq have heart-rending tales to tell of genocidal campaigns with horrible weapons. The Shiite minorities of southern Iraq can tell the world - including their religious brethren in Iran - of the intolerance of the Baathist Party, which has governed Iraq and Syria for many decades.

America needs to show in unmistakable terms how wicked and despicable our enemies truly are, and liberating the Iraqi people from the iron rule of the monster Hussein will do just that. Moreover, as the ninnies of the Democrat Party equivocate and whine, President Bush can show again with even greater clarity the real difference between his virile leadership and their craven relativism.

After Iraq, America should begin to systematically dismantle the evil regimes which still hold power in North Korea, Iran, Cuba, Libya, and Sudan. Give the leaders the option of leaving safely (living off their Swiss bank accounts in luxury) or being forcibly removed from power and given long sentences in the same sorts of prisons to which they have sentenced so many others.

The tonic of military victory is good for any nation. The stronger medicine of decisive victory over evil is even better for great democracies. Iraq, that most immediate threat and that most indefensible regime, should go first. And we should act hard and fast.

_________________________________________

Bruce Walker has been a dyed in the wool conservative since, as a sixth grader, he campaigned door to door for Barry Goldwater. Bruce has had almost two hundred published articles have appeared in the Oklahoma Bar Journal, Law & Order, Legal Secretary Today, The Single Parent, Enter Stage Right, Citizen's View, The American Partisan, Port of Call, and several other professional and political periodicals.

Send the author an E mail at Walker@ConservativeTruth.org.

For more of Bruce's articles, visit his archives.

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