Via
Michelle Malkin,
LT Nichols in Baghdad:
Senator Reid: When you say we've lost in Iraq, I don't think you understand the effect of your words. The Iraqis I speak with are the good guys here, fighting to build a stable government. They hear what you say, but they don't understand it. They don't know about the political game, they don't know about a Presidential veto, and they don't know about party politics.
But they do know that if they help us, they are noticed by terrorists and extremists. They decide to help us if they think we can protect them from those terrorists. They tell us where caches of weapons are hidden. They call and report small groups of men who are strangers to the neighborhood, men that look the same to us, but are obvious to them as a foreign suicide cell.
To be brief, your words are killing us. Your statements make the Iraqis afraid to help us for fear we'll leave them unprotected in the future. They don't report a cache, and its weapons blow up my friends in a convoy. They don't report a foreign fighter, and that fighter sends a mortar onto my base. Your statements are noticed, and they have an effect.
Finally, you are mistaken when you say we are losing. We are winning, I see it every day. However, we will win with fewer casualties if you help us. Will you?
Respectfully,
LT Jason Nichols, USN
MNF-I, Baghdad
By
Donald Kirk via the NY Sun:
So great was anti-war pressure across America that Nixon, soon after announcing the foray into the communist base areas, placed a strict limit on the presence of American troops in Cambodia — no more than 60 days. Nor would they go down much beyond the Ho Chi Minh trail network which Hanoi had been sending supplies to for years.
That wasn't all. Just to pin down American forces still more tightly, the next January, our Congress passed the Cooper-Church amendment barring military operations inside Cambodia as a condition for the military budget.
The North Vietnamese suffered devastating blows while American troops were there but had plenty of time to regroup and mount a full-scale invasion of South Vietnam two years later — the Easter offensive — in which they were again thrown back, only to recover and return one last time in the winter and spring of 1975 when all American troops had gone.
Now Congress is playing the same game. Forgetting the lesson of 1970, the House and Senate want to set a limit on the duration of U.S. military operations inside Iraq.
The voting on this maneuver has broken down largely along party lines — the Democrats shouting down the Republicans, but you don't have to be a card-carrying conservative or a Republican to recognize this bid for legislative command of the armed forces as a betrayal of our troops.
We are not going to win a war, or get out with any semblance of honor, by telling our enemy to just lie low for a while and next month or next year we'll be gone. America lost in Vietnam as a result of anti-war opposition at home.
Read
the rest.
