After the Embassy Attack Let’s Demand Answers. Why Are We Still In Iraq?
(This was posted before US forces killed Iran’s terrorist leader Soleimani. It has not been edited)
Here’s what success looks like:
At the end of World War II the Japanese surrendered to General Douglas MacArthur aboard the USS Missouri, which had sailed triumphantly into Tokyo harbor. (photo) Gen. MacArthur then became commander of US occupation forces in Japan.
The war against Japan cost Billions of dollars and almost 200 thousand Americans severely wounded or killed. Our leaders believed the American people who had sacrificed so much deserved an unambiguous and permanent victory. To that end, under MacArthur’s direction, a new Constitution borrowing principles from the US Constitution, was written for Japan, mostly by two American Army officers who had law degrees. Japanese officials were allowed to suggest edits and some of their suggestions were accepted. But we imposed this new Constitution over the objections of Japan’s entrenched government officials. We forced them to hold elections of people who would enforce and preserve it.
What does failure look like?
America’s middle east misadventures since 1990 are textbook failures. We have not achieved anything close to permanent peace anywhere in the Middle East. On New Years Eve the Iraqi government failed to meet its obligation to protect our people as a gang of thugs attacked the US embassy in Baghdad. Our government officials proudly tell us this is the largest US embassy in the world!
The obvious first question is, what do our employees do at the largest embassy in the world and how does their work benefit Americans who pay the bill? Nobody in our government bothers to keep us informed. The media don’t look into anything unless there’s an anti-Trump angle.
MacArthur and his staff were from a generation that was routinely instructed in America’s founding documents and were thus prepared to borrow from and adapt the wisdom therein to a Constitution for Japan. But today, most of our recent college graduates have never read the US Constitution in high school or college. They have not been instructed in it’s background or intent. They have not read even one paragraph of the Federalist Papers. Thus, they are easily duped into believing preposterous lies, such as the charge that Trump’s request for Ukraine cooperation in an investigation of the Bidens was somehow “Unconstitutional.” They accept the New York Time’s “1619 Project,” selling the vicious lie that America’s founding was based entirely on and intended only to preserve slavery.
Apparently, even though our deep state employs thousands of arrogant “experts” we just don’t have anyone with the knowledge and discipline to succeed in Iraq or Afghanistan or Iran or any part of the middle east as MacArthur and his team did in Japan. Four years after the Japanese started the war by attacking Pearl Harbor, our military had defeated them, occupied and pacified them, written their new Constitution and overseen their first election as free people. In Iraq, sixteen years after our troops successfully invaded and deposed their brutal dictator they still have not been pacified. Their government is so dysfunctional it won’t even try to protect our embassy from street thugs. Our deep state officials have utterly, spectacularly failed.
Apparently we don’t have an articulable mission for our continued presence in Iraq and we don’t have a vision of what success would look like. If we did, wouldn’t pompous State Department functionaries like the ones who raged against Trump in Adam Schiff’s House impeachment circus proudly assemble before the cameras to explain the mission and vision to us? Even after this intolerable attack on our embassy they say nothing to justify sinking even more blood and treasure into Iraq.
We at Liberty Works urge the President to give the deep state sixty days to review activities in Iraq and articulate a rational, doable mission for “the largest embassy in the world” and some 5,000 troops still stationed there. And, if they cannot demonstrate to the President and to regular, common-sense Americans that WE benefit from from risking the eyes, limbs and lives of our troops, and from pouring even more billions into the bottomless pit that is Iraq? Then President Trump should declare that our victory over foreign oil dependency enables us to close the embassy in Baghdad because we no longer have a reason to be ensnared in pointless Middle East chaos and bloody, Islam Vs Islam feuds.
