Reflections on the Iraq front
As a Republican Senator from Minnesota from 1978-1991, my friend Rudy Boschwitz was a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In 2005 he was the American ambassador to the UN’s Commission on Human Rights. I profiled him for the Standard in "The ambbassador nobody knows" during his ambassadorial stint. Drawing on his Senate experience, he has forwarded us his reflections on the left then and now, and why we must win in Iraq:
After four years of a war in which 620,000 Americans would die, in July 1864, just four months before a presidential election that he felt “exceedingly probable” he would lose, Abraham Lincoln issued a call for 500,000 additional troops. Not 30,000 from a population of 300,000,000 for a “surge.” But 500,000 to continue the slog of war from the Union’s population of 22,000,000 that had already suffered losses of hundreds of thousands of its sons.Washington’s situation in the Revolution was at least as bad – perhaps worse! In a war lasting seven years, he had not won a major battle. The blood on the ground at Valley Forge was from the feet of the Continentals. They had no shoes. The Congress would send no money. Yet both Washington and Lincoln persisted. One wanted to create a country. The other’s purpose was to hold it together and give freedom to all its citizens. In both cases their perseverance was rewarded. In each case victory appeared rather quickly just before the end of the conflict.
In today’s impatient America, as the images of war appear incessantly night and day, clearly neither war would have been won. The press would have become the arbiter of military results and tactics, as they certainly tried to be in the time of Lincoln and Washington. Legislators who opposed the use of force would be the ones who earned the headlines. Think of how often Senator Harry Reid and his allies would have conceded defeat in both the Revolution and the Civil War. Surely it would have been innumerable times.
It was the same during the Cold War when I served in the U.S. Senate. Sitting through hearings and debate in the Foreign Relations Committee and listening to the speeches on the Senate floor, it was hard to be an optimist about the future of our country or the free world. Reagan was characterized as a lightweight who hardly understood the events with which he dealt. His calling the Soviet Union the “evil empire” was unnecessarily provocative and pugnacious. As was his philosophy of “we win, they lose” which was considered not only offensive but unrealistic. Detente was so much more civilized and comforting. But in a single-minded fashion he too persisted and the results were as he said they would be.
But in the Senate hearing rooms of the '80’s, Socialism was considered on the march, not open, democratic societies. The “good guys” in the eyes of the Senate Left (and the press) were the Sandanistas, not the Contras who were fighting for a free society aided by the hated CIA. The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) was dubbed “Star Wars” and deemed a pipe dream that would never work. The Left may be right about its efficacy. It’s still not entirely clear. But there is no doubt that SDI contributed enormously to the collapse of Communism. Gorbachev could talk about little else to Shultz and Reagan. He told Reagan at Rejkavik that he had missed his opportunity to be a great president by insisting on SDI. But Reagan persisted again, while the Left howled in unison with the press.
In my case the Russian Ambassador and other Communist Bloc diplomats talked of little else except SDI when they came to my office. If I had had any doubts about the program, their concern certainly would have erased them as did our knowledge that they were aggressively pursuing SDI themselves.
It was a battle every step of the way to get the defense buildup of the '80’s. In fairness it wouldn’t have happened in the Senate without Democrat allies like Henry “Scoop” Jackson, John Stennis, Fritz Hollings, and others and their counterparts in the House. There was a fight over every weapons system, each unfailingly challenged as too expensive, unnecessary and excessive, and the money spent was done so only by denying poor Americans.
The Nuclear Freeze people were on the march. They crowded into my office. Some even camped outside. Huge demonstrations appeared in Washington, throughout our country and Europe as well. Yet the momentum of the '70’s, which was clearly in the Soviets' favor, had changed. NATO countries – that operated only by unanimous consent – took and placed our nuclear tipped Pershing and Cruise Missiles on their soil. This in response to the Soviets' placing SS-20’s in Europe, to which the Left raised little or no objection.
So the present opposition to Iraq should be no surprise. It’s a different cause but it’s the same people making the same mistakes they have made since the days of Vietnam. Europe, the continent where most wars broke out, has seen the longest peaceful period since the Dark Ages because of American strength and the American presence there. Rising prosperity has been guided by American policy, the openness of our market, and the stability of the dollar.
A sure way to undermine America’s ability to maintain peace and spread democracy and freedom is to cause it to fail in Iraq. Perhaps a great country can lose one war and recover as we have, but not two. If we pull out before the job is done, thereby accepting Harry Reid’s declaration of defeat, our country will be terribly weakened. An implacable foe that already thinks it beat one superpower (the Russians in Afghanistan in the '80’s) would be immeasurably strengthened.
