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Pullout

Now that the cause is lost, America is pulling troops out of occupation duty. The foreign policy established by a President that many once considered being illegitimate and has inflamed many countries including former allies to break publicly against the nation, is finally at an end.

Of course, I’m talking of the US Army leaving Germany.

From the UK Guardian:

"Eleven bases in and around the Bavarian city of Wuerzburg will be handed over to the German government by September 2007, the Army's European headquarters in Heidelberg said. Two more bases near Wuerzburg will close and be handed over in subsequent years.

The Defense Department said the changes affect about 6,100 soldiers and 11,000 family members as well as about 1,000 Army civilian employees and 1,000 civilians employed locally.

The closures announced Friday are part of plans for most of the Wuerzburg-based 1st Infantry Division to return to the United States in mid-2006 and plans to relocate, convert and deactivate other parts of the Army's 5th Corps. The military also has said it will move the Wiesbaden-based 1st Armored Division - the other main element of 5th Corps - out of Germany..."

The last European war, fought 60 years ago, resulted in an occupation and a rebuilding of a foreign nation at unprecedented levels. The long term occupation of a sovereign nation by foreigners who didn’t speak the language didn’t understand the culture, who before they occupied their nation exposed it to a ferocious bombing, killing hundreds of thousands of its civilians, then placing their nations leaders on trial and executing them for their crimes.

What was the result? A nation at the center of Europe that is now at peace with its neighbors for the first time in millennia. A nation that was once the center of strife for every European generation since 1870 is now a nation so pacifist that it redefines the center of the leftist world. The German Green party and its Communist allies are strongest of all in Germany.

To be sure, Germany still has a military and its members are professional and experts in their field, but to say that the German military and the German people hold onto any illusions about the role of the military in a free democracy as they one did is to misunderstand everything that Germany has learned.

There was a time when the leader of Germany believed that the people in America were weak degenerates, who because of their low breeding and love of democracy could not stand against the strong will of the German superman. He was not alone, many people, smart people, people who should’ve known better, people who in other roles were my heroes, also thought that we didn’t stand a chance against the might of German Nazi ideology.

At the core of the war our grandfathers fought was a simple idea, that idea was “Are humans the instrument of the state, or is the state the instrument of the people”? Most of the rest of the world though that the battle was ‘Fascism vs. Communism”, but the battle was actually freedom against slavery. However, Americans spent the early years of the war, simply wishing nothing more than to be left alone. While our English cousins were being bombed in their homes with iron provided to the Nazis from the Soviet Union, our government, many celebrities and “progressives” worked day and night to stop our President from aiding the English in their struggle against Nazi tyranny.

What truly horrified our grandparents was that the stakes were so high. It wasn’t a flag or a government that was changing; it was the nature of mankind itself. There was no safe haven from the horror; our enemies had made their position clear. There were ‘Aryans” and everyone else, no in-between. There was no safe middle. There was no cultural diversity and understanding, no “peaceful coexistence”. They made their position clear, if you weren’t German, you weren’t safe anywhere, and no matter who you were, if you were Jewish, you were as good as dead, no matter your station in life, no matter your patriotism to Germany in the First World War.

When the war started, our grandparents weren’t so sure we could win, but they also knew they didn’t have any choice, the war came to them, they couldn’t hide from it anymore.

When the war started, the enemy was 10 feet tall. The Germans had overrun the French Army, an Army that was twice the size of the German Army. The English had been humiliated and evacuated from the shores of France, and again from Norway. By the time of the “Battle of Britain” The Germans had driven the English from all of Europe and had their small island within a U-boat blockade. At the time of the Battle of Britain, the best they could hope for was stalemate. Victory for England seemed too far away to imagine.

This all happened before we in America lifted a finger. In fact, at the time the majority of our government took steps to ensure that we did nothing to help at all. This all ended when The Allies of Germany, The Imperial Japanese, every bit as racist and imperialist as the Nazis attacked our Navy base in Hawaii. For 4 years, Americans stopped their lives and gave all and on the shores of Normandy, we began to answer Hitler directly on the question of whether or not the sons of democracy could beat the sons of the German Reich. The question was answered once and for all in the snows of Bastone, where the Germans enjoying a decided advantage still found themselves unable to remove a determined American force. At that point, the war was effectively over.

However, even after V-E day, the questions still came. “Can Germans be made live peacefully” “Will we ever rid the world of Nazis” “Can we pacify Europe”? “Should we punish the German people?”

In his book, The Conquerors: Roosevelt, Truman and the Destruction of Hitler's Germany, Michael Beschloss made the following observation about President Truman as he rode through the conquered German capital during the Potsdam Conference in 1945.

The car pulled up at Hitler's chancellery, near his underground bunker. Truman refused to go in, saying that he wouldn't want any of "those unfortunate people" to think he was "gloating over them." But he muttered acidly to Byrnes that he wasn't sure the Germans had "learned anything" from the Nazis' miserable end.

Truman returned to his villa that evening deeply depressed. He wrote to his wife, Bess: "This is a hell of a place---ruined, dirty, smelly, forlorn people, bedraggled hangdog look about them. You never saw as completely ruined a city." Truman noted in his diary how the refugees reminded him of his family’s displacement and resentment at the hands of the hated “Yankees” at the end of the Civil War.

American kids from Brooklyn, Atlanta, the Ozarks, Boise, Detroit and Seattle had beaten the very best of the SS and the entire German Reich could throw at them and now the President, a failed businessman from the state of Missouri rode through their capital, yet he was humbled by what he saw, He did not act as a conqueror, he acted as a man, seeing only the humanity in the defeat of his enemy.

Its been said that there can be no peace without capitulation. While only 4 years before, the Germans were the masters of the world, now it was clear to everyone, including the German people that they had lost, and lost badly. The myth of the Aryan superman was no more. The question now was what would the sons of Democracy do to them in return?

At this point the story of the end of World War II would end the way a thousand other wars had ended. But something happened at the end of this tale, something no one would have guessed, and it was something wonderful that should give us all hope.

People in America could see that the people of Germany weren’t superman, and they weren’t animals either. They were people. They were as much victims of Hitler as anyone else was. Harry Truman found it hard to hate the Germans after seeing their people crawl through the streets of Berlin.

The world faced a choice at the end of the war. Punish the Germans for their crimes, or let them up easy, feed them, give them their dignity and let them into the family of man as equals.

Despite the advice from others, we chose instead to feed the Germans. We chose to invest in their country, creating industries that would directly compete with our own. We learned to say please and thank you to people we had only recently worked so hard to kill. The result of this simple idea was that the world saw a miracle happen. A country that still showed the scars of war in 1960 became an economic powerhouse, not because of their military, but because they didn’t have one. They didn’t need one.

They had friends; they had us.

And now, were going home. Not out of anger, not because we’ve been driven out by “German freedom fighters”, but because the war waged against Germany by the Soviet Union is over and our purpose there has been fulfilled. Our troops are needed elsewhere. We’ve kept our promise to the German people and they’ve renounced warfare as a method of policy.

There will be no reporter “know it all” touting our departure as a failure of the Truman Doctrine, because our departure shows that it worked. We bet on the German people to be able to overcome all that they had going against them, and the bet has paid off.

We are “pulling out” of Germany, but you won’t hear it described that way. The term “pulling out” is reserved for special uses in the mind of the press.

“Pullout” is a loaded word and the term “pulling out” is a loaded phrase. It’s used by the “intelligencia” to show the futility of warfare. . It’s meant to demean those in service to our country. It’s meant to confuse little minds with sexual innuendo. It’s meant to say that once again, the President is wrong, and here why. The same people who use the term “pullout” also say “ war is not the answer” and use the illusion of humiliating defeat to make their case.

As the world learned in Germany, when the question is genocide and enslavement, war is certainly the answer. War is a horrible nasty thing that should never be entered into lightly, but there are worse things. The people of Treblinka, Auschwitz, Lidiche know that warfare is just one way to die and that sometimes a little war is better than a big genocide.

There is now an effort underway by the left to turn victory into defeat. The people who once argued we only went to Iraq for the oil are already screaming that we are leaving, and by calling it a “pullout” it acts as a preemptive attempt to set the tone of the debate, to say that we’ve lost when in fact, we’ve won. The Iraqis have won. They still have their oil, and now they have their dignity.

The world bet that we wouldn’t expose our soldiers to fire to remove a dictator, and they were wrong. The world bet that we wouldn’t leave if we did invade and again, they were wrong. The world said that the Arabs couldn’t be trusted to vote and yes, they were still wrong. The world said that civil war would break out, once again, wrong. They said that the Shiites, the Sunni and the Kurds could never make a working government, and yes, once again, they were wrong.

Of course, being wrong every single time should be no reflection on the lefts intelligence, but it should cause us to evaluate their value in the debate.

Our bet was on the Iraqi people, and we were right. We bet that the Baathist Tikriti Clan wasn’t really made up of 10-foot tall supermen but snickering little losers who once they lost the support that fear and intimidation gives would either be killed or locked up by the people they once exploited. We bet that Iraqi people weren’t animals. We bet that they were just people, and that like people everywhere, no matter their faith, no matter their condition, that they would choose freedom to tyranny.

Leaving Iraq in 2006 is not a defeat, it’s a victory. Today, not a single town, or region of Iraq is owned and operated Al-queda. The strongest of their towns was Falluja, a town we overran in 7 days. Since Falluja, no insurgent has been silly enough to try the same thing elsewhere. Sure, they set of bombs at the side of the road and the occasional pot shot, but to no avail. We still go where we want when we want, how we want. More importantly, despite all that goes against them, the Iraqi people continue to join their police forces, join their Army, and help their government. They are turning over insurgents in such numbers that together with the Iraqi people, we have managed to apprehend 50,000 criminals, bandits, and terrorists and put them under guard.

This is all being done not is some far off academic vacuum, its being under the very nose of Islamo-fascist Iran, right next door.

Iraq and Afghanistan mark the very first wars in history where we find people streaming into the war zone, rather than out. There is no greater metric to how the “Arab street” measures our armed forces and their generosity than the fact that there are no refugee camps on the border of Iraq, filled with people waiting to return to their homes in “occupied Iraq”. They knew what was happening, and they didn’t leave when the war started, they stayed. They didn’t hide on Election Day; they stood in line and voted.

We didn’t go to Iraq to occupy, we went to liberate, and now having done so, its time to move our troops where they need to go. The illusion that car bombs being set off in the streets of Baghdad means that we’ve lost, belies the fact that for several decades Israel has been beset by bombs, yet they too go on insisting that they have a country. Why should the Iraqis not be made of the same stuff as Israelis? Or of Britons, who once underwent a campaign of terror bombing in their capital by the Irish Republican Army, and yet still insist on staying.

The miracle of World War II isn’t that Americans, who having survived the great depression went into battle with only 90 days of training and managed to beat the “Aryan superman” on his own home turf at a war they had trained for 10 years to fight. The miracle was that despite our losses in a war we didn’t start, that despite our natural desire for vengeance we still managed to set it aside because we recognized the common goodness of mankind. We fed our former enemies and helped rebuild their country. We bet on the Germans, and the bet paid off. It was a gamble, and it was by no means certain to win. Its over now and we can go home, as friends.

We are placing the same bet on the Iraqis. The Iraqis are people and they deserve the freedom that was taken from them by people who wished only to enslave them.

We owe them the same faith in humanity that we owed the Germans. Don’t deny the Iraqis their victory over enslavement by reducing their victory with the derisive term “pullout”.

Posted @ July 29, 2005 09:29 PM | Current Affairs

Posted by: Ghost Dansing at July 30, 2005 01:50 AM