The vague concept of moral authority does not make you right.

I tried to steer away from politics in this journal for a long time but a recent opinion piece by Leonard Pitts got my blood up enough to have to comment.

First of all, I really like Leonard Pitts. He is one of the few columnists that I regularly disagree with yet enjoy reading. He is an award winning writer with good reason: he makes compelling arguments and he writes in a style that’s very comfortable to read. And that is why I was so disappointed in the tripe he recently published about Cindy Sheehan.

Now, I have to issue the standard disclaimer here: I feel bad for her as a mother who’s lost her son in combat. You’re not a human being if you cannot sympathize with that. Still though, it gets tiring when you hear leftists like Pitts claim that she has absolute moral authority and we can’t question the things she says. Things like “The biggest terrorist in the world is George W. Bush!” Really Cindy? Bigger than the people that engineered the strikes against the U.S. that killed nearly 3,000 people in a single stroke? Bigger than those that packed bombs into Madrid rail stations? Bigger than those that detonated bombs in London and were planning to do so again? Bigger that those that stormed a Russian theater and created a hostage standoff that left over 100 people dead? Bigger than those that stormed a Russian school to take children hostage. A fucking elementary school!! That’s what the opposition does. What do we do? We organize flight plans that dictate out planes drop bombs from a certain direction so the bomb blast carried over from the plane’s momentum blows AWAY from civilian areas. We use precision munitions that can strike an area the size of a shoebox, again to minimize civilian casualties. Are mistakes made? Do civilians get killed sometimes? They absolutely do but what would al-Qaeda do given our same arsenal? Would they take the same precautions? The fact that the whole of Iraq isn’t a smoldering crater is a testament to our restraint. When have terrorists been known to show restraint?

Cindy is also demanding to meet with the President. Sorry again but you had your chance; you should have said what you wanted when you met him after Casey was killed. You can’t demand a meeting with the President of the United States like you might demand a meeting with the manager of the local McDonalds.

Then you have people like the leftist agitator Al Sharpton proclaiming that he would protest an unjust war regardless of the president’s political party. Funny – I don’t remember him making such a spectacle of himself when President Clinton ordered missile strikes against Afghanistan and Iraq. Or when he ordered a bombing campaign against Slobodan Milosovic’s killers. Or when he ordered the invasion of Haiti. What are the criteria Al?

The Cindy people keep telling us that we went to war for a lie. I remember all the Democrats in Congress getting all the same intel as the President and voting for the war. It was only after Howard Dean started moving up in the Democratic primaries that the anti-war movement in the Democrat party really gained steam.

Cindy tells us that President Bush would send his daughters to the fight if he really believed in the cause. He hasn’t, ergo he must not truly believe in the war. Well, let’s see where else that logic gets us:

• President Bush must not believe in law enforcement since he hasn’t sent his daughters to become police officers.
• President Bush must not believe in a regular trash pick up since he hasn’t sent his daughters to become garbagemen (or women, as the case may be…).
• President Bush must not believe in reading since he hasn’t sent his daughters off to be authors.
• President Bush must not believe in air travel since he hasn’t sent his daughters to become pilots.

So Jenna and Barbara aren’t serving overseas. What’s the point again?

Back to Pitt’s moral authority argument: not to diminish Cindy Sheehan’s grief but her loss doesn’t make her right. Say Wile E. Coyote had dropped an anvil on Casey’s head. Would she have come out against gravitational theory? Would the American left squat in a Texas ditch demanding we withdraw from gravity’s effects? Would gravity suddenly become “wrong?” Of course not. And yes, I realize what a ridiculous example that is but it merely serves to illustrate the fact that Sheehan’s grief does not make her infallible. It certainly does not give her any more moral authority than, say, Gary Qualls who lost his son Louis Wayne Qualls in Iraq. Louis' 16-year old little brother that is now planning on enlisting and his father supports the decision. They are part of a counter protest at “Fort Qualls” but how many have heard their story? You don’t think Cindy Sheehan is being manipulated by the American left for its own political agenda?

Fort Qualls supporters have called for a debate with the Camp Casey crowd but have been rebuffed. The Camp Casey folks are happy with the coverage they’re getting; demanding a meeting with the President that they know they’ll never get and never having to defend their positions. Especially not against other parents that have lost children in the war and still believe in it.

Perhaps the biggest offense that Cindy Sheehan has committed in my eyes is to absolutely shit on the memory of her dead son. Let us get one thing straight, as a matter of fact I’ll put it in its own line just so we’re clear on this:

The U.S. military is a volunteer force. President Bush didn’t send Casey anywhere – he volunteered.

Our troops sign their names on the dotted line knowing full well the risks that they are getting into. As blogger Scott Randolph put it:

“Guess what folks….they signed up to join the Army, not the boy scouts. Anytime your orientation to a new job involves an automatic weapon, you should be smart enough to figure out there’s danger involved. I actually read some people’s comments about many of the soldiers over there being naive….they weren’t expecting to go to war, so, they should be allowed to go home. Wow.

Soldiers know, when they enlist, that it is entirely possible they will be shipped out and never come home. It’s part of the job. The fact that people still walk in to recruiters’ offices and sign that piece of paper make them heroes. To imply that they are simple kids who didn’t know what they were getting into, or even worse, that they died for no reason, or an immoral reason, does a horrible thing. It strips their sacrifice of the honor that it deserves. Even though those folks sitting out there in the Texas fields claim to honor and support the soldiers, they obviously have been blinded by their own selfishness as to the real way to support them.”

Bravo Scott. How does a full withdrawal from Iraq honor the sacrifices of the men and women that have died? It takes their death and throws into the toilet. They will have died for nothing – absolutely nothing – if we leave without stabilizing Iraq, regardless of what got us into the conflict in the first place.

Leonard Pitts writes:

“…Sheehan’s protest has galvanized opponents of the war, given face and voice to their gnawing anger over a costly conflict whose resemblance to Vietnam is becoming inescapable.”

So the left is bringing Vietnam into the equation now. Why? Because we left without finishing the job; without accomplishing the objective. This must be a proud comparison for the left. It speaks volumes about a political party and a political ideology that stands to benefit only when the United States is defeated.

While there may be similarities to Vietnam, perhaps a more appropriate comparison would be to the Battle of Mogadishu, made famous by the “Black Hawk Down” book and movie. In both cases we were faced with an insurgency populated by those that did not wear uniforms, those that would kill our soldiers and drag their mutilated bodies through the streets. In Somalia, it was because we were there to *gasp* FEED THE FUCKING PEOPLE and keep the warlord Aidid from taking our food shipments so he could use hunger as his weapon. In Iraq, it’s because we are simply there. It doesn’t matter to the terrorists that we want to rebuild the country’s infrastructure and leave it with a representative democracy. What monsters we must be. It doesn’t matter that the Iraqi populace has turned against the insurgents and that they are only viewed favorably by a small Sunni minority.

Once we had our noses bloodied in the Mogadishu battle, the popular sentiment was to withdraw our troops immediately, identical to the current wishes of the American left. And we did. How did the troops react? With elation right? Read for yourself.

“Had any of us had our way, we would have stayed there. We would have stayed there and turned around and gone in the very next day with reinforcements and just leveled the city until nothing was standing except for freakin’ Aidid, hiding under a table with no city around him. ‘We gotcha. We accomplished our mission.’ But we weren’t allowed to do that.”
- Keni Thomas, battle survivor (Ranger)

“A lot of people who have talked to me about this battle have asked me if the American soldiers who fought in it are bitter and they’re not bitter about having been there or about the mission or about their commanders. They’re bitter about the fact that the day after this battle, their mission was called off.”
- Mark Bowden, Author of “Black Hawk Down”

“Now don’t get me wrong, we were all happy to go home. Somalia is a… there’s a reason there are no timeshares in Somalia, you know? It’s an awful place. But you’re talking about a lot of very highly trained, type-A personalities who had a job to do and were prevented from doing it. And if you’re gonna do that, then why send us in in the first place? Why lose those lives if you’re not serious about it?”
- Lee Van Arsdale, battle survivor (Delta Force)

“We stopped. We ceased all operations and turned what was a hard fought, brutal victory into an absolute defeat by handing over the advantage to the Somalis and giving them the very victory that we had fought all day for. As the Commander in Chief and leader of this country, which is always the same person, you absolutely have the obligation to be as strong as the people you send out to die.”
- Dan Schilling, battle survivor (Air Force Combat Controller)

So there you have it Cindy, Al, Leonard and anyone else who shares the cut-and-run strategy. The reaction of people who fought and watched their comrades die for nothing, which is exactly what you are asking of the soldiers in Iraq now. To this day, Somalia has no government, no stability and its people are still suffering. This is what an immediate withdrawal from Iraq would result in. So what should our exit strategy be anyway? Simply put: a free and stable democracy in Iraq.

Our exit strategy is victory.