We have been re-thinking Congressman Murtha’s incoherent statement of the other day. Frankly, his rambling and disjointed thinking suggests to us that the man may have a medical problem. He did, however, make sense for a brief moment: “Our military has done everything that has been asked of them.” They did indeed. They won the war. Now the question is: will they get to hang around for the victory party.

Please do not accuse us of being flippant; however, we believe there was a lot of truth to the Mission Accomplished banner of two years ago, and so much more now. The tyrant was toppled. A new government was established. Elections took place in January. A constitution was approved by 78% or so of the voters, on a schedule light years ahead of America’s own experience, as we have written. Iraq is on its way to being a successful country, a semi-successful country or something else. Time will tell; but these are post-war events.

Yes, there is an insurgency, greater than that in Germany after WWII. Probably it would be smaller in Iraq if we had killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and did saturation bombing of the country for a couple of years. But this is not total war. Consider the scope of the insurgency this way: the US military death rate today is not much different than the average of the last quarter century. For example, US military deaths averaged about 2000 per year for all of the 1980’s. By this statistical measurement, what the US is engaged in in Iraq does not appear to be a war at all.

But the combat our brave soldiers face is real, and that brings us to our point regarding Murtha. The US has forces deployed around the globe, as this chart from Global Security shows:

Why on earth would we want to remove our forces from the one place where they can kill our enemies in significant numbers? If you want to bring 140,000 troops home, you can get more than that number from Germany, Japan and South Korea. In the accounting world there is a concept called FIFO — first in, first out. If we apply that concept to American occupations and military commitments in foreign wars, our military presences in Germany, Japan and South Korea are getting pretty long in the tooth, and may be ripe for redeployment. Iraq is the last place you would think America would want to deploy away from. We are getting more intelligence and dead enemies there than anywhere else.

Having said this, it does appear to us that the nature of the war against the Islamists is changing, and that the Iraq phase is being overtaken by other events, some heartening, others less so. For example, Zarqawi being denounced by his family and much of his country is a terrific development. On the other hand, the passivity of the French in response to weeks of violence is an open invitation to even more violence and unrest by an enemy who despises weakness above all. We wonder what the enemy thought after watching C-SPAN the other night.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 20th, 2005 at 10:16 am and is filed under General, Religion, War. 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.