As the election escalates, I believe the war in Iraq will become more of an influencing issue to voters. While Islamic terrorism against the United States started in Beirut, it escalated under the Clinton presidency: The World Trade Center attack 1993; Khobar Towers Military complex 1996; Kenya US Embassy 1998; Tanzania US Embassy 1998; Yemen, USS Cole 2000.

Clinton’s response was to downsize the military, the CIA and the FBI while further hindering information sharing between the agencies. He also failed to kill Osama bin Laden in 2000 when he had him in the sights of a predator drone at his training camp in Afghanistan.

Bush started the war on terror, but it was widely accepted by both parties that Iraq was a threat to our national security. There’s a reasonable argument that the United States could not tolerate both al-Qaida and a rouge state like Iraq, flush with cash from oil sales. The same argument still exists for Iran.

Bush has had many failed policies in Iraq. He planned for an occupation instead of training the Iraqis to be leaders. He failed to build regional governments. Even so, taking the war on terror to Iraq has kept it off of American soil to date.

A look back in history shows that Americans were similarly impatient after World War II with the prolonged efforts to establish democratic governments in Germany and Japan. That war ended 58 years ago and we still haven’t pulled out of Europe. It took over a decade to glean significant results. There were large factions that felt that we should pull out of those countries, which would have most likely led to the Soviets or the Chinese taking them over. Fortunately, we stuck it through to see both these countries become the world’s largest economies behind our own.

Ultimately I don’t believe that the defeatism attitude of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama will be accepted by the American people as the presidential race heats up. Obama wants to tuck tail and leave Iraq to be plundered by Iran, throwing away our investment of money and lives and the freedom of the Iraqi people. Hillary believes we can mostly pull out, but fails to understand the reality of the forces required to maintain the peace, much less to maintain the successful surge campaign.

Their position on the war may be truly untenable to the electorate. Most Americans don’t like losing.

ALAN SAGE
Grand Junction

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 18th, 2008 at 3:04 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.