"Fundamental Irrationality?"

I wholeheartedly support our troops, both in Iraq and around the world. I do not believe that Abu Ghraib is an honest indicator of the character and honor of the vast majority of troops who make up the American armed forces. I do not believe that peace-loving Iraqi bystanders often find themselves in such places as Abu Ghraib under the watch of sex-crazed soldiers with digital cameras. And I am unwavering in my belief that we still have a job to do in Iraq and that we had better be willing to stay there and get that job done or we can expect 9/11/2001 to become a minor memory compared to the destruction we will invite upon ourselves by the show of weakness that withdrawing from Iraq with the job as yet unfinished would invite.

There was a time in this country when making a statement such as that might have resulted in my being called a great patriot, a man of firm convictions, and someone who fully understands the gravity of war. But yesterday it resulted in me being told that there is a “fundamental irrationality” in my response to the issues in Iraq, and more particularly to Abu Ghraib. By my refusal to jump on the bandwagon to denigrate the American troops in Iraq I have now been accused of claiming that all Iraqis are terrorist scum who are only worthy of abuse by American soldiers. Well it seems that I, and perhaps those like me, just may have been somewhat misunderstood.

I certainly know that there are vast numbers of Iraqis who are nothing but simple non-combatant civilians. When I speak of “the enemy in Iraq” I am clearly referring to the indigenous and insurgent forces that continue to stand in total defiance against our armed forces, and thus against the liberation of Iraq. My position with regard to the supposed “atrocities” in Abu Ghraib in no way implies that the bulk of the Iraqi people are scum who are only worthy of abuse from our troops. The central point of my refusal to join in the global fuss rests on the very fact that the prisoners and troops involved in those events do not in any way represent the whole body of people on either side of the equation.

Those Iraqi prisoners do not represent the common Iraqi citizen any more than the seven or so completely asinine American soldiers of Abu Ghraib fame represent either the 135000 other soldiers in Iraq or the whole of the United States Armed Forces worldwide. Furthermore, those seven or so soldiers, and any commanding officers who may have been involved in those events, do not in any way represent America at large. We simply do not tolerate that type of treatment of prisoners anytime, or anywhere, whether the recipient is some crack head criminal from our own city streets or a combatant detainee in a war zone in Afghanistan or Iraq. In fact, we Americans usually bend over backward to extend rights to our enemies, once they are in custody, that most of them could not and would not ever expect from their own governments abroad.

In a country such as Iraq, with a population of nearly 25,000,000 people, it would obviously be impossible for us to have any hope of liberating the common citizens with a force of only 135,000 of our own soldiers if any significant percentage of that population were actively arrayed against us. We are very good at war, but we are certainly not that good at it. Just the mathematics of the equation clearly represents that there are far more Iraqis who are content to let our soldiers do what they are there to do, and to wait peacefully to find out what manner of government they are going to have among themselves when all of this is said and done.

It seems to me that it is precisely that point that is being overlooked by all the hand wringing commentators who claim that the issues at Abu Ghraib have somehow completely ruined any chance or hope we might have had for success in Iraq in the first place. If the outrage among the common Iraqi people were even one tenth the degree of that which we have seen and heard from certain pontificators in the international media, and even from certain of our own elected officials in the U.S. Senate, then I imagine that 135,000 brave American men and women in uniform would have to be scrambling for the nearest exits in Iraq even as we sit here considering the point. But such is not the case, and there is an obvious reason for that.

Those we are fighting against are but a tiny fraction of the people in Iraq that we are fighting to liberate. Generally speaking the common people of Iraq are just waiting and watching to see if we are actually going to deliver the freedom that we promised them, regardless of what the voices of dissent are saying about us both in America and around the world. They have a personally vested interest in this outcome, and the voices of dissent quite simply do not. Therefore the common people of Iraq are hoping against hope that we will emerge victorious in this action, rather than turn and run away shamed to the core by the actions of a number of individuals so small that Saddam himself might have had them executed before breakfast for no reason at all and without so much as a second thought as he sipped coffee from a golden chalice.

Those who have elevated the events at Abu Ghraib to such heights as to make them the pivotal event in the entire recent history of Iraq now want to paint all of our troops with the very broad brush of “indecent, inhumane, Arab hating, imperialist Americans”. And having painted them as such, they now demand that our troops pack up and leave Iraq before they destroy the whole place. Incidentally, those same supposedly concerned voices are crying out for us to turn Iraq’s future over to the clearly corrupted body known as the United Nations. This, even before the depths of depravity known as the “Oil for Food Program” have been fully investigated and any necessary punishments meted out for that fiasco which built palaces for Saddam and lined the pockets of countless “U.N. associates” around the world with truly filthy lucre. That whole atrocity was carried out at the expense of the very same Iraqi people that so many are now calling for us to allow that same U.N. to oversee in the rebuilding of their country. Where the heck does that line of reasoning come from? I have an idea, but that is a topic for another day.

The bulk of the clamoring voices from around the world continue to spout completely senseless rhetoric based almost entirely upon the actions of seven or so debased soldiers that were clearly in violation of military law. Yet those same clamoring voices seem to be brushing aside the fact that, thus far, we have brought every one of the perpetrators up on charges and they will all face courts-martial for their criminal behavior. At the same time, the remainder of 135,000 U.S. troops remain in Iraq serving honorably in an effort to insure the freedom of the generally unmentioned 25,000,000 Iraqis (give or take a few thousand here or there) who are not fighting against us, who do not hate Americans just because they are Americans, who do not chant anti-American slogans for the cameras, and who do not strap bombs onto their torsos to seek out Paradise by the murder of both innocents and the very soldiers who are there to bring them security and some hope for the future in the first place.

The fact that the elitist liberal naysayers from around the globe have raised such a cacophony of claptrap which bears no resemblance to the realities on the ground in Iraq does not indicate that folks like me have fallen into some kind of fundamental irrationality. Rather, it actually proves that those naysayers totally lack any grasp of the fact that there is a vastly larger number of decent common folks in Iraq who are hoping against hope that we will succeed in our mission. The dissidents among us just do not understand the fact that the Iraqi people can, for the first time in their collective memories, hold on to hopes of someday having their own free and peaceful society… a place where they too can cry out against perceived government injustices without fear of real torture and real death as the imminent result of their pursuit of the very same rights we all simply take for granted as we argue their fate from places safely removed from the front lines.

In my opinion, there are far too many people around the world who are already enjoying these freedoms, but who are also crying out far too loudly for the removal of the very forces attempting to guarantee similar rights for the approximately 25,000,000 indigenous non-combatants in Iraq who would probably be overjoyed with just a fraction of the freedoms their supposed dissenting defenders already enjoy. Furthermore, those who are making the biggest stink over the supposed horrors of Abu Ghraib generally have no clue whatsoever regarding the plight of the common Iraqi. After all, they get the bulk of their information from the ratings seeking broadcast news and a print media that has already immeasurably proven its own political bias; which, oh by the way, just happens to perfectly match their own political persuasion to a tee.

If anyone has fallen into a trap where this issue is concerned, I believe it is the free people from around the world whose rhetoric (while on the surface it sounds a lot like compassion) is actually nothing more than the typical liberal building materials for more prison bars, more torture chambers, more iron-fisted tyrannical rule, and more mass graves in a country none of them has any inherent concern for in the first place and which none of them would ever have reason to mention in daily conversation if it were not for the chance it currently offers them to voice their own political dissent and personal hatred for the world leaders who are making the hard choices and doing the right thing in Iraq today.

It is fundamentally irrational to believe that you can expect to gain peace and safety for the common Iraqi citizen by removing the limited forces that currently maintain some semblance of military balance against the terrorist minded forces who still wish to deny them that very right. It is further fundamentally irrational to believe that you can help the Iraqi people by loudly and roundly denigrating the coalition forces at large for the actions of only a literal handful of bad apples among them. And you absolutely cannot have it both ways, claiming to be for the Iraqi people who are relying upon us to get the job done, and at the same time calling for us to get out and leave the job unfinished. Clearly the fundamental irrationality resides with those who are of the opinion that any of those things just mentioned are somehow sensible and true. They are not.

May God Almighty bless our troops and destroy our enemies from before us… or at least give us both the strength of will and the good fighting necessary to get that job done ourselves… both for ourselves and for those on whose behalf we are there.