It’s Halftime In The Iraq War

A Commentary by J. D. Longstreet

I continue to read piece after piece about the war in Iraq winding down for US troops.  Nothing could be farther from the truth.  The US is in the Middle East for the foreseeable future whether we want to be – or not!

It is only halftime in the Iraq War.  We have just finished the first two quarters and we’re off to the locker room to rest up and prepare for the second half.   There will be a second half.  Count on it.    The US has “forward positioned” war fighting material in the area in preparation for the day we next take the field in Iraq.

US troops are leaving Iraq not as winners, and not as losers -- for the war is not over.  Everyone with a lick of sense knows it. 

Iran is waiting for the dust to settle and they will begin to apply their strangle hold on Iraq.  Through out the war American troops have been fighting Iranian troops and defending against Iranian “insurgents” -- all of this on the soil of Iraq.

In my opinion -- the war in Iraq was not only a good idea -- it was necessary.   Had the US not intervened, Saddam Hussein would most certainly have gained control of a huge share of the world’s oil supply.  Iraqi troops would have smothered Kuwait and Saudi Arabia very quickly and Hussein was headed that way. 

As to the claims that Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, we KNOW that he did.  He used them on his own people.  WMD are NOT necessarily nuclear in nature. There are radiological, biological, and chemical weapons of mass destruction. 

There is also a school of thought that Hussein also had some nuke capability, possibly old Russian nuclear artillery shells, and the ability to create the so-called nuclear “dirty bombs.”  Some feel the Russians and the Iranians spirited those weapons out of Iraq into Syria and Iran days before hostilities began.

Saddam Hussein had to go just as Ahmadinejad in Iran has to go.  Currently Ahmadinejad is at, or very near, the top of the list of world troublemakers who find themselves in the sights of oil consuming nations around the globe.  Face it.  No one is going to be allowed total control over the flow of oil from the Middle East -- no matter the cost.

The US made a bad decision when it decided to “nation build” in Iraq.  Rather, it seems to me, we should have set up an occupational government and run the government with American military officials for as long as was necessary… even decades into the future.  As it is, we are leaving an Iraqi government that will be lucky to stand long enough for US troops to exit Kuwait.     

Even with American training the plain truth is the Iraqi military and police are pathetic.  At the first sign of real trouble it will become extremely difficult to find an Iraqi soldier or policeman.  Uniforms will be shed and they will melt away in the crowds and may even take up arms against the current government. 

Nobody wants to say it publicly but the fact is the Iraqi House the Americans built was built on quicksand and will soon sink beneath the shifting sands.

Iraq was chosen as a “killing ground” for the Islamic terrorists of the world.  And they came.  And they died. And that was good for America.  We fought them over there to avoid having to fight them over here.  It worked very well, indeed.  Islamofacists from all over the world poured into Iraq to fight the Infidel.  And the infidel kicked their collective butts into Paradise where Allah could sort them out at his leisure.  It was America’s way of “thinning the herd.”

I am not one of those pie in the sky ideologues who believe the so-called “Arab Spring” a good thing.  In fact, I think it will turn out to be a very bad thing for America and the West.   Islamofacism, I suspect, will manage to take over the majority of the countries involved in the revolutions that swept the Arab tier of states this past summer.   If I am right, and I believe I am, it will mean that America will not be allowed to disengage from the Middle East in any meaningful way.  We are there, and we will be there, for generations into the future.

No.  The Iraq war is not over.  It’s only halftime.

J. D. Longstreet