God Bless America
A touching commentary by a young staff sergeant in the National Guard, who served in Iraq and recently returned home to his family.
RELATED: Iraqi Freedom 2.0 The WSJ writes:
“A year ago, on the first anniversary of the capture of Baghdad, the Boston Globe carried a doleful op-ed by Clinton Administration diplomat Peter Galbraith. In handling the postwar effort, he wrote, President Bush had “transformed a difficult mission into an unachievable one.”
We don’t single out Mr. Galbraith to underscore how wrong Administration critics turned out to be. Rather, like others who supported the President’s decision to go to war in March 2003, he is emblematic of how the U.S. effort nearly came undone: not because of this or that tactical misstep, but because too many among America’s elite lost their nerve when the going got tough.
This may well be the most important lesson coming out of the Iraq war…whether the U.S. could prevail if the war became an extended test of wills against a determined foe using guerrilla and terrorist tactics. This was a test not of the skill or bravery of the American soldier, but of the home front’s willingness to see the war through; a test in which the key to victory wasn’t competence but perseverance.