A Senseless War?

In today’s Frederick News Post, columnist Joe Volz writes Senseless War. He seems to be intimating that since some retired military officers are disagreeing with the prosecution of the war, that the war is somehow senseless in its outcome.

“It has been almost 40 years since President Lyndon Johnson conceded, at the height of the Vietnam War, that since he had lost Walter Cronkite, he had lost the country.

The popular CBS anchorman, Uncle Walter to millions, concluded in 1968 that the war was unwinnable and the United States should leave.

Mr. Cronkite was right.

We lost the war. Mr. Johnson lost his presidency and 50,000 American soldiers lost their lives. President George Bush is no Lyndon Johnson.

And Dave Meadows of Frederick, a retired Navy captain, who rose up the ranks from seaman in a 37-year career, is no Walter Cronkite.

But if Mr. Bush has lost Capt. Meadows, a tall, effusive native of Georgia, he has lost America, too.

Capt. Meadows spent nearly 10 years at sea and has more than 5,000 hours flying in patrol aircraft. In one way or another, he was involved in every Middle East conflict
between 1970 and 2004. He was in the Pentagon on that murderous 9-11.

The other day, he told me, "Disagreement can be the voice of reason. If military recommendations had been followed early after the victory (the military victory in Iraq), I believe our troops would already be home and we would not be hearing a growing comparison of Iraq as a 21st Century Vietnam."

Capt. Meadows is an accomplished author who has published nine military adventure novels. His new one, "Pacific Threat" (Berkley Publishing Group), is due out in January.

He figures our political leaders should have sent in many more troops when we decided to go into Iraq, as some top military leaders advised. We made the wrong claims about why we were going in and have developed no clear-cut way to get out.

Capt. Meadows doesn't pretend to know if pulling out would improve the situation in Iraq, but he does know this: it would save American lives.”

Now I know Captain Meadows, our backyards share a common fence, and I’ve talked to Captain Meadows before about many topics, but never about The War on Terror, so I’m not going to even presume that I know how Captain Meadows thinks about Iraq, but I can tell you this…Captain Meadows is wrong if he believes that pulling out of Iraq will save lives. Will it save the lives of those soldiers that don’t have to stay in Iraq and continue the fight? Sure it will, but that goal is a short term solution that does nothing to solve the problem and the real question becomes how many American’s will die because Mr. Volz and Captain Meadows get their wish? I’m not even sure that Captain Meadows is even suggesting that we immediately withdrawal from Iraq because in his comments as reported by Mr. Volz clearly states that he expected even more soldier be put in harms way earlier in the fight.

What Captain Meadows is saying is the same thing that many military experts had been saying since the beginning, there weren’t enough men on the ground to effect a decisive victory, and it became a fire fighting unit, rushing from one crisis to another never truly occupying the ground and creating power vacuums, that allowed militia leaders to assert their authority over neighborhoods.

The failure in Iraq wasn’t in removing Saddam from power it was in not declaring total war to ensure victory. It’s the theory that sometimes you have to use a sledgehammer to kill the ant; we should have accepted a zero tolerance for acts of violence against the populace and US Military personnel.

Mr. Volz is still insisting that American men and women not be sent off to fight wars in foreign countries, but the truth of the matter is, if we don’t send them off to fight wars in foreign countries, we very likely might be sending our young men and women off to die in a war within our own borders.

The war in Iraq is not a mistake, the prosecution of that war might be up for question but the Strategic and moral goals are not. When Mr. Volz states: “Now, it is time for our great nation to admit that we are making a tragic mistake staying in Iraq any longer. It is up to the Iraqis, not us Americans, to determine if a government of the Iraqi people, by the Iraqi people and for the Iraqi people, shall perish from the earth or not.” He is clearly showing that he has no concept of the cost of not fighting this war. He still believes that on 01/20/2009 all terrorist aggression against the west will cease and that is a belief system that is not based in any sense of reality.

If Mr. Volz truly wants to bring our troops home and stop all terrorist action around the world perhaps he should be penning columns that call upon our leadership to stop politicizing the war effort and making politically correct decisions about the tactics being used. When we allow the enemy to define the battle space and the condition upon which we will attack them, for fear of offending them, then we will have truly lost the war.

In that sense Mr. Volz is not far off target, but his approach does nothing to resolve these errors. Neither does Captain Meadows’ comments, the short term goal of saving lives in Iraq should not be paid for by our children and grand children because we were afraid to do what is vitally necessary. What is senseless about this war is that so many, on both sides of the aisle have decided that their contribution to the effort should be more debate when what is needed is total victory. President Bush never had you to loose Mr. Volz, and I am not yet lost.

Update: Open posted at Pirates Cove.