The President’s December 14th Speech
The President visited the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars to give the last in his series of speeches on his strategy for victory in Iraq. Here are some of the most important sections of that speech:
We are in Iraq today because our goal has always been more than the removal of a brutal dictator; it is to leave a free and democratic Iraq in its place.
It shouldn’t be a surprise that this was part of President Bush’s strategy from the start. After all, that’s what he did in Afghanistan. Why should anyone believe that that wouldn’t be part of the strategy in Iraq?
This time last year, there was only a handful of Iraqi battalions ready for combat. Now there are more than 125 Iraqi army and police combat battalions in the fight against the terrorists. Of these, more than 70 Iraqi battalions are fighting side-by-side with coalition forces, and more than 50 others are taking the lead in the fight. So far, in December, there have been more than 900 combat operations in Iraq at the company level or above, and 75 percent of these involved Iraqi security forces either in the lead or fighting side-by-side with our coalition. As these Iraqi forces grow in size and strength, American and coalition forces can concentrate on training Iraqis, and hunting down high-value targets like Zarqawi and his associates.
This is powerful news because it’s apparent to everyone who isn’t a moonbat that there’s a dramatic improvement in the quality of Iraqi troops. This also undercuts the arguments that John Murtha is making that we’re the targets. Why target troops that aren’t in the lead and who are extremely proficient at killing the dwindling amounts of terrorists and Saddamists?
This is also good American strategy because U.S. troops can go after HVT’s or train Iraqi troops while Iraqis take more of the lead in combat operations. As Dan Senor told us this afternoon, U.S. forces are mainly used in the logiistics side of the operation, although they’re obviously used as backups in extreme cases and as advisors to troops and in working side-by-side with Iraqi troops.
This also refutes Harry Reid’s ‘prebuttal’ of the President’s speech, where he said Bush’s address “failed to provide the American people with any insight into his strategy for completing the mission” in Iraq. “After four speeches, we still do not know the remaining political, economic and military benchmarks that must be met and the schedule for achieving them.”
Reid later changed course and said “President Bush resorted to discredited and misleading rhetoric. For the president to truly take responsibility for intelligence failures, he must level with the American people about how his administration hyped intelligence and cherry-picked information to justify the march to war.”
Harry’s had a pretty tough couple of weeks so don’t get too upset with him. He’s had to change tactics and strategies so often that he likely doesn’t know which end is up. Of course, it might be argued that that’s his natural state of mind.
At any rate, it’s obvious that Harry’s comments weren’t fact- or reality-based because, if they were, he wouldn’t have said that the President didn’t present “the American people with any insight into his strategy for completing the mission” in Iraq. Only an idiot or a buffoon would argue that after the President’s four speeches on Iraq. Again, I wouldn’t be able to refute your arguments if you said that Reid was a buffoon or an idiot because I wouldn’t have enough proof to prove otherwise.
Earlier this week at the Philadelphia World Affairs Council, I spoke in depth about how we changed our approach to helping the Iraqis build their democracy. At the request of Iraqi leaders, we accelerated the transition to Iraqi self-government. We set four major milestones to guide Iraq’s transition to constitutional democracy: the transfer of sovereignty, elections for a transitional government, the adoption of a democratic constitution, and elections for a new government under that constitution. In spite of the violence, Iraqis have met every milestone, and this is changing the political landscape in Iraq.
Thus far, all of the major milestones have been met on time, with the Iraqi Parliament putting off for a week the passing of the Constitution being the only setback. Tomorrow’s vote will be the Iraqi’s third vote in 320 days and it will install a parmanent government that will implement the Constitution that was ratified only 61 days ago. The pace that these things have been achieved is incredible in historical terms.
For the Harry Reids of the world, going from a provisional authority to an interim and sovereign government to the writing of a temporary Constitution to the January 30 elections to the writing and ratification of the new Iraqi Constitution to electing a permanent government WHILE training Iraqi troops who are leading a large portion of the operations and while putting down the insurgency isn’t too bad of a strategy. Then there’s this thing about them rebuilding, or in many cases, building new infrastructure so the Iraqis have water and electrical power and hospitals and schools and the like and you’ll see that there’s been a pretty comprehensive strategy from Day One.
Only politicians like Sen. Reid, Rep. Murtha or Gov. Dean will tell you otherwise.
After World War II, President Harry Truman believed that the way to help bring peace and prosperity to Asia was to plant the seeds of freedom and democracy in Japan. Like today, there were many skeptics and pessimists who said that the Japanese were not ready for democracy. Fortunately, President Harry Truman stuck to his guns. He believed, as I do, in freedom’s power to transform an adversary into an ally. And because he stayed true to his convictions, today Japan is one of the world’s freest and most prosperous nations, and one of America’s closest allies in keeping the peace. The spread of freedom to Iraq and the Middle East requires the same confidence and persistence, and it will lead to the same results.
Truman was ridiculed for thinking that democracy could succeed in Japan. Today, we take such things for granted. If not for Harry S.’s unflinching belief in the power of freedom, the outcome might have turned out differently. Truman’s vision of Japan is strikingly similar to President Bush’s vision of Iraq. History does repeat itself. Especially in that light, we should be extraordinarily willing to let President Bush pursue this incredible vision.
Today there’s an intense debate about the importance of Iraq to the war on terror. The constant headlines about car bombings and killings have led some to ask whether our presence in Iraq has made America less secure. This view presumes that if we were not in Iraq, the terrorists would be leaving us alone. The reality is that the terrorists have been targeting America for years, long before we ever set foot in Iraq.
We were not in Iraq in 1993, when the terrorists tried to blow up the World Trade Center in New York. We were not in Iraq in 1998, when the terrorists bombed our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. We were not in Iraq in 2000, when the terrorists killed 17 American sailors aboard the USS Cole.
KABOOOM. There goes the Democrats’ main argument for retreat and defeat. Their’s is a defeatist attitude that isn’t grounded in facts. When we first invaded Afghanistan, we were told that we couldn’t win there, that Afghanistan was the place that armies went to die. After we vanquished the Taliban to the “unmarked grave of discarded lies”, we were told that the now discredited “Arab Street” would rise up.
Eventually, they were partially right and mostly wrong. They were mostly wrong because the Arab Street that we were supposed to be so intimidated by finally rose up and decried the actions of…Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Over 100,000 people took to Amman’s streets to protest Zaqawi’s killing people in three major hotels including a hotel that was hosting a wedding.
After that, Howard Dean said that we were creating more terrorists by being in Iraq. Shortly thereafter, John Kerry and other Democratic presidential hopefuls were saying the same thing. This was ludicrous, too, because their logic was founded on the fact that we were creating more terrorists by killing of large numbers of terrorists.
It’s also worth noting that terrorism was at its worst when it wasn’t taken seriously and that it’s only gotten under control after we took it seriously and started killing, not prosecuting, the bad guys.
About the only thing that pundits got right back after the war in Afghanistan and prior to the war in Iraq was when they said that Arabs respect strength.
I’ve listened carefully to all the arguments, and there are four reasons why I believe that setting an artificial deadline would be a recipe for disaster.
- First, setting an artificial deadline would send the wrong message to the Iraqis. As Iraqis are risking their lives for democracy, it would tell them that America is more interested in leaving than helping them succeed, put at risk all the democratic progress they have made over the past year.
- Secondly, setting an artificial deadline would send the wrong message to the enemy. It would tell them that if they wait long enough, America will cut and run. It would vindicate the terrorists’ tactics of beheadings and suicide bombings and mass murder. It would embolden the terrorists and invite new attacks on America.
- Third, setting an artificial deadline would send the wrong message to the region and the world. It would tell our friends and supporters that America is a weak and unreliable ally, and that when the going gets tough, America will retreat.
- Finally, setting an artificial deadline would send the wrong message to the most important audience, our troops on the front line. It would tell them that America is abandoning the mission they are risking their lives to achieve, and that the sacrifice of their comrades killed in this struggle has been in vain. I make this pledge to the families of the fallen: We will carry on the fight, we will complete their mission, and we will win.
This section is the most powerful rebuttal of the Democrats’ ’strategy’ I’ve ever seen and I couldn’t be happier that President Bush finally made it. It’s a dagger blow to the middle of their chest. They know he’s right, too, because the logic is so strong.
We can’t leave and we must succeed because: (a) we don’t want to tell Iraqis “that America is more interested in leaving than helping them succeed”; (b) we don’t want to tell the enemy…that if they wait long enough, America will cut and run”; (c)”it would tell our friends and supporters that America is a weak and unreliable ally, and that when the going gets tough, America will retreat”; and (d) “it would tell our troops on the front line that America is abandoning the mission they are risking their lives to achieve, and that the sacrifice of their comrades killed in this struggle has been in vain.”
We cannot and will not do that to our allies in the region and throughout the world nor will we do that to the Iraqi patriots nor will we do that to our troops. To do so is to ignore our responsibilities and break our promises. That’s simply unacceptable. It’s unconscienable. And it’s the only thing that would give (and I mean that literally) our enemies a victory.
The President ended his speech with this flourish:
And we can be confident because we have on our side the greatest force for freedom in human history: the men and women of the United States Armed Forces. (Applause.)
One of these men was a Marine lieutenant named Ryan McGlothlin, from Lebanon, Virginia. Ryan was a bright young man who had everything going for him and he always wanted to serve our nation. He was a valedictorian of his high school class. He graduated from William & Mary with near-perfect grade averages, and he was on a full scholarship at Stanford, where he was working toward a doctorate in chemistry.
Two years after the attacks of September the 11th, the young man who had the world at his feet came home from Stanford for a visit. He told his dad, “I just don’t feel like I’m doing something that matters. I want to serve my country. I want to protect our lands from terrorists, so I joined the Marines.” When his father asked him if there was some other way to serve, Ryan replied that he felt a special obligation to step up because he had been given so much. Ryan didn’t support me in the last election, but he supported our mission in Iraq. And he supported his fellow Marines.
Ryan was killed last month fighting the terrorists near the, Iraq’s Syrian border. In his pocket was a poem that Ryan had read at his high school graduation, and it represented the spirit of this fine Marine. The poem was called “Don’t Quit.”
In our fight to keep America free, we’ll never quit. We’ve lost wonderful Americans like Ryan McGlothlin. We cherish the memory of each one. We pray the loved ones, pray for the loved ones they’ve left behind, and we count it a privilege to be citizens of a country they served. We also honor them by acknowledging that their sacrifice has brought us to this moment: the birth of a free and sovereign Iraqi nation that will be a friend of the United States, and a force for good in a troubled region of the world.
The story of freedom has just begun in the Middle East. And when the history of these days is written, it will tell how America once again defended its own freedom by using liberty to transform nations from bitter foes to strong allies. And history will say that this generation, like generations before, laid the foundation of peace for generations to come.
May God bless you all. (Applause.)
Ryan McGlothlin represented the heart of America and we should all be inspired by his willingness to leave behind what outwardly appeared like a great life to serve a cause far greater than himself. He left Stanford to join the Marines so he could have a positive impact on this world and he succeeded in a way far beyond what most of us ever will.
Ryan died so that a nation of enslaved people, people who were oppressed by a viscious dictator, could taste the nectar of liberty that you and I too often take for granted.
In dying for such a noble cause, Ryan has given us a glimpse of what we should aspire to: a life that positively impacts others and possibly change the course of history.
Cross-posted at LetFreedomRing