Not a waste of Lives instead Mission Accomplished
Richard Cohen, in his March 22 column, calls the liberation of 25 million Iraqis from the mass murderer Saddam Hussein — who made war on two of his neighbors and launched missile attacks on Israel — a “waste of lives,” and accuses the Bush administration of underestimating the number of troops required and ignoring the requirements of nation building.
No one suggested Dwight Eisenhower be sacked when he “underestimated” the strength of German resistance and was caught napping during the Battle of the Bulge.
Or that our commanders in the Pacific be fired for the carnage of Okinawa, Iwo Jima, and kamikaze attacks on the fleet.
So far we have lost fewer soldiers than we did in the Normandy invasion.
Those who complain, as he and his brethren do, that we still have 130,000 troops in Iraq three years after Operation Iraqi Freedom began, and that the Iraqis can’t or won’t defend themselves, forget that we had several times that number in Europe for over five decades.
Those who voted on March 21 did not do so under threat of death as have the Iraqi people who did so three times in one year. In three years Iraq has gone from a brutal dictatorship to electing a provisional government to ratifying a new constitution to electing a permanent government.
In each of these elections, voter turnout increased, from 8.5 million in the January 2005 election to 12 million in the December election.
In Anbar province, where Sunnis are the overwhelming majority, voter turnout grew from 2 percent in January to 86 percent in December.
Some 100 Iraqi battalions are currently in the fight, with 49 controlling their own battle space.
About 75 percent of all military operations in the country include Iraqi security forces, and nearly half are independently Iraqi-planned, Iraqi-conducted and Iraqi-led.
It is these Iraqi forces that prevented the descent into civil war after the bombing of the Golden Dome Shrine in Samarra.
I’d call the pretty successful nation-building and not a “waste of lives.” Mission accomplished
