Hagel defends dissent; who defends loyalty?
by Bob Hoig, Publisher
Midlands Business Journal
U.S. Senator Chuck Hagel “defends dissent” on the Iraq War, the Omaha World-Herald noted in a front page headline this week.
Hardly a “man bites dog” revelation in a nation where dissent is the agenda for much of the Democratic political party.
Dissent, after all, is what gets you on television and into the headlines.
Much rarer is loyalty – loyalty in the sense of steadfastness, of purpose, of will, of staying a course set by our president and ratified by Congress.
When President Bush and Britain’s Tony Blair acted to rid the world of an obviously deranged, murderous Saddam Hussein, it was with near unanimous Congressional support.
The United Nations had enacted 17 resolutions demanding that Saddam let weapons inspectors do their job inside Iraq or face the consequences – and gotten nowhere.
Bill Clinton, when he was president, had asked for a resolution by Congress calling for a regime change in Iraq. He got the resolution, but talked and did nothing.
George Bush’s fiercest Democratic critics, to say nothing of Republicans such as Senator Hagel, also called for ousting Saddam Hussein.
Former Vice President and presidential candidate Al Gore and Sens. Hillary Clinton, Ted Kennedy, Patrick Leahy and John Kerry, among many others, are on the record saying that Saddam had to go.
President Bush did the right thing, and they turned on him.
Well, what if Saddam had stayed?
Here’s our guess:
By now, nearly three years farther along the path, he would already be Osama bin Laden writ large – the world’s number one state sponsor of terror.
He would be nearly three more years along the path of perfecting weapons systems for his own war plans and for supplying terrorists.
He would have found even more people and nations to bribe to keep himself immune from punishment – think the French, Germans and Russians, who opposed any military action; think the billions of dollars scammed for bribes from the United Nations’ oil for peace program, again to immunize Saddam from any restraint or removal.
George Bush and Tony Blair did what Blair’s late countryman Winston Churchill wanted to do but could not because of political opposition – namely, stop a madman (Adolf Hitler) while there was still time.
That failure, in our estimation, led to 50 million World War II deaths.
Any comparison between Hitler and Saddam would show Saddam the greater cause for alarm at a comparable point in their development. Before World War II, Hitler had only outlined plans to mass murder political opponents and gas Jews. Saddam had actually gassed thousands of Kurds, murdered and buried in the desert more than 400,000 political opponents, invaded Iran and Kuwait and paid bounties of $25,000 to families of suicide bombers who killed Jews.
When American, British and other Allied forces drove from the southern Iraq border to Baghdad in barely more time than it would have taken a taxi driver, the cause of freedom was on a brilliant track.
But now, what seems to be underway is a repeat of the Vietnam failure of will of the 1960s and 1970s (See Tony Blankley’s column on the page opposite this).
First, the radical left attacks, then the left-most elements of the Democratic Party, then the Party’s mainstream, and finally, irresolute Republicans.
It is hard to imagine our diplomats again having to be helicoptered off a foreign rooftop such as happened in Saigon to end our Vietnam effort.
If it happens in Iraq, it will be even less pretty and with far more devastating consequences.
November, 2005
