Recently I have been receiving emails in response to some of my earlier blogs from very passionate liberals. While I welcome the spirited discourse generated by these emails I am wondering why they chose that venue instead of commenting directly here. One of them said he could not leave a comment but every time I test that it works for me so I don't know. Anyway, one of the things that constantly crops up is the liberal mantra of how wrong and evil it was for our country to invade Iraq. Last night I was actually sent a link to a news article by one of them that tells about an Iraqi who lied to us about their Chemical Weapons program and how that information was used to justify invading Iraq. I guess the goal was to somehow convince me that the chemical weapons I was exposed to in the First Gulf War were no longer there or not real in the first place in 2003. Really? Is that how far a leftist liberal has to go to discredit the Bush Administration. In response I am posting a couple letters I received from our governement under the Clinton Administration in 1997 and again in 2000. As you can see these letters admit my unit was exposed to Sarin and Cyclosarin nerve agents that were destroyed by our forces after the cease fire in March of 1991. Folks, we did not bring the stuff with us! The Chemicals were developed by Iraq and put into their arsenal long before we arrived. I believe it is crazy to think we destroyed all of their chemical weapons when we were not even near Baghdad at that time!
That raises another issue that I take exception to with the left. When our forces entered Iraq in the Spring of 2003 it was not an un-provoked attack. It was a resumption of combat operations due to Iraq having violated the terms of the ceasefire they signed in 1991 to stop hostilities. During the next twelve years Iraq continually snubbed their nose at the UN by not allowing inspectors to do their jobs, by attacking their own people, by threatening their neighbors and many more indiscretions aimed at ignoring the world and intimidating its neighbors. Even President Clinton knew Iraq was a rogue country and while I am not satisfied with his response to their clear violations, his administration did respond, even with force. To those Bush haters like my new liberal friends who believe the presence of WMDs in Iraq was a myth I ask this. Where
did all those chemical weapons go?
I have some answers provided by some of our popular media outlets. In 2006 Fox News reported over 500 WMDs had been found in Iraq by our forces from 2003 thru 2006. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,200499,00.html As recently as October 25, 2010 the New York Post reported that in the WikiLeaks documents there was plenty of evidence that our forces had been finding not only caches of chemical weapons but labs and remnants of a chemical weapons program. http://www.nypost.com/p/news/international/us_did_find_iraq_wmd_AYiLgNbw7pDf7AZ3RO9qnMAnother thing that has always irked me about the liberals in this debate is there insistence that deposing Saddam Hussein and the Bathist Party was somehow not in our best interest. This view seems to come universally from people who have never met an Iraqi citizen. I have. As a matter of fact my unit, the 344th MP Compnay, (the first platoon of which I was a member is located right here in Worcester) escorted over 22,000 Iraqi soldiers from the battlefield during the Gulf War. What I learned about them is this. They are smart, literate and care about the things you and I do. Jobs, the pursuit of happiness and a sense of safety for their families. Under Saddam those things were not guaranteed or even enjoyed by most of their citizens. Just ask a Shiite or a Kurd.
Taking out a rogue regime after it violated a ceasefire agreement with us was not only the right thing to do, it was necessary. In that part of the world, anything less would have been looked upon as being weak and it would definitely have led to more tragedy for us all. As far as the argument that we were creating more al qaeda members by our actions, there is just no proof of that. There is plenty of proof however that our actions in Iraq attracted thousands of al qaeda members and sympathizers to the battle from other countries who wanted to kill us. Instead most of them were killed or captured. That in and of itself was a victory. While Iraq is not the most stable place on Earth yet, it is certainly a lot better off now than it was under Saddam and there is a form of democracy taking hold there, despite what the liberals believe.
