Fan Mail

I received a comment to the George Bush speech post from a frequent visitor named "godessaradia". I assume that she is a she, if not then he can inform me. Here is the comment:

Perhaps you can fill me in on the debates that we may never win this war without a draft. It's been rumored as such, and we all know that recruitment has not been meeting their quota's for months.

As for the first part, I distinctly remember Presidant Bush, Vice Presidant Cheney, and several other prominant figures (Including Democrats) assuring the nation that this would be a quick war with few casualties and that most of our time would be spent helping the iraqi people rebuild their country instead of killing insurgents. That was the whole reason I backed this war from the start. So what happened?
goddessaradia | 06.29.05 - 12:21 pm | #

And here is my reply:

goddessaradia,

No one in the administration ever, never, said that this would be a quick war with few casualties. If you can find any such statement, actually quoted on the net, please let me know where it is.

However, the war itself was quick and there were very few casualties. The bulk of Saddam's armed forces surrendered or fled or were killed within 30 hours of the invasion.

It has been the cleaning up of the mess he left behind that has been the problem. Foreign jihadists have flooded the country and the decision was made by our leaders to allow this to continue so that the enemy could be fought in one place, rather than pursuing them all over the world. Martyrs from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, UAE, Yemen, Jordan, Egypt, Iran, Syria, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman, Algeria, Libya, Morocco, France, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Chechnya, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakstan and several other -stans, Britain, Canada, Australia, Indonesia, the USA and several other countries have flocked to Iraq to get their 72 virgins.

It will take a while to kill them all.

We had no idea when we got there that the country's infrastructure was in such sad condition. Roads, bridges, streets, water supplies, the electricity grid, the oil fields, the airports, schools, hospitals and social services were in disastrous condition. All of the Oil-for-Food money not paid in bribes to European, Russian and Chinese politicians and United Nations officials had been spent by Saddam, Uday and Qusay on weapons, palaces, booze and women.

We destroyed the weapons, drank the booze, made the palaces our military headquarters and set the women free.

Now we rebuild the infrastructure, a project that will take many years and cost billions and billions of dollars.

Once the Sunni are fully convinced that the Shia and Kurds, whom the Sunni repressed and murdered by the millions during Saddam's reign, are not going to exact revenge and that there will be a place for them in the government of Iraq, this game will be over for us. The Sunni will turn on the foreigners among them as well as on any Iraqi Baathists still around, and kill them all.

There will be trouble in this country long after we are gone. It will be only the second democracy in all of the Arab world, Palestine and North Africa - Israel being the only other one. These people don't know how to run a country. They haven't the foggiest idea. It will be a long hard road for them but there is a light at the end of the tunnel. That light is called HOPE.

I was remiss in not answering her first question. The United States military is an all professional force and will remain that way, unless the Chinese attack us (aka commit suicide). If our military shrinks due to enlistment problems then we will fight with a smaller military. That is not a good thing for our enemies to contemplate. We would have to replace manpower with technological power. That means more and bigger and more dangerous weapons.

The last time that the US military faced a similar problem was in 1945. Our leaders were faced with the prospect of invading the home islands of Japan with an armed force not large enough to defeat and occupy the country. We were faced with the prospect of outrageous casualty numbers if we invaded. Casualty numbers that our leaders did not wish to contemplate. So, look what we had to do - Hiroshima and Nagasaki. No one should wish to have to even faintly consider such an action again.

It won't ever be necessary (again, depending on the Chinese) but I bring it up as an example of the use of our technology to save American lives. True, it was at the expense of hundreds of thousands of our enemy's lives. We didn't start the war - they did.

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