Friday, July 27, 2007
Opinion
As good as our word
What if we would have gone to war with Hitler...
An Iraqi Sunni man begs U.S. soldiers to protect his house and neighborhood in Baghdad. The soldiers took down his name and number and promised to stay in touch.
CREDIT: Chris Hondros/Getty Images |
By Eric Von Haessler
What if we would have gone to war with Hitler just after he invaded Poland? We might have lost thousands of soldiers putting Adolf in his place—and many Americans would have wondered if our boys died for someone else’s cause. Certainly there would have been a faction claiming it was Poland’s problem and that it should have been their fight.
But hindsight shows us that at least 6 million lives would have been saved if Hitler had been defeated before constructing his first concentration camp. That’s 6 million souls before we get to the many thousands of dead American soldiers it took to finally bring Hitler to his knees: In one month in 1946, in Normandy alone, we would lose almost 10,000 soldiers—more than twice as many as we have lost in four years in Iraq (and we won in Normandy).
Now flash forward to Cambodia on April 17, 1975, just two weeks before the last American soldiers withdraw from neighboring Vietnam on April 30: The regional power vacuum created by America’s departure from Vietnam is filled by diabolical leader Pol Pot—who, with his Khmer Rouge troops, takes the capital city Phnom Penh. He will spend the next four years brutalizing and killing 2 million people identified as so-called enemies of the state; many of these were Vietnamese refugees from the bloodbath next door caused by the American withdrawal. (At least 1.5 million out of Phnom Penh’s population of about 2.5 million were such refugees.) This, in a country that had a population of only 7 million at the time.
During these hazy days of summer 2007, when everyone and his mamma has turned against the Iraqi mission and is demanding nothing less than full and quick withdrawal, it might be instructive to stop thinking about correcting the past and start thinking about what is likely to happen in the near future.
We’ve given our word to a lot of innocent people in Iraq that we would stay and try to keep order. So far, despite some setbacks, we’re still good for our word.
There is bound to be a bloodletting when we leave Baghdad that may well rival what happened in Cambodia after we left Vietnam. That means there are thousands, maybe millions, of people alive today who will be brutally murdered if we leave. How would you like to be the family in Iraq who vocally supported our efforts there once we’ve left? At best they’ll get a kangaroo court; at worst they’ll just be shot in the head and kicked into a mass grave.
Those who never wanted this war will say they warned us and they can’t be held responsible. The mood seems to be that this is all just a problem that needs to get fixed. But we can’t fix Iraq by leaving. History isn’t correctable like that. History just keeps unfolding from the present moment onward.
When thousands of innocents are getting their throats slit in the vacuum left after our withdrawal, it may be enough for Leftists in this country to comfort themselves by blaming it all on Bush. But that’s cold comfort to an ordinary Iraqi who took us at our word and was then left abandoned to these beheading monsters.
Wars are always bad. Mistakes and misjudgment have been a part of every winning campaign this country has ever mounted. Find a paper from late 1862 and see what people were saying about Lincoln and his “war of choice.” The difference between our winning campaigns and our losing efforts has simply been our will to fight.
So here we are again at a historical precipice. Another Cambodia is poised to happen. Are we really prepared to just sit back and watch it go down?
The truth is that because al-Qaida is involved in all of this, we won’t be able to just let it happen. Which means we’ll eventually end up going back to stop it. Why not take care of these little Hitlers now, rather than wait for the holocaust to come?
If we walk away from Iraq now, we’ll lose a lot more soldiers in the future trying to get it back. SP
More of Eric Von Haessler’s observations can be found at myspace.com/madpundit