Dean Says U.S. Must Surrender or Face Defeat in Iraq

DNC Chairbeing Howard Dean yesterday said what he & his cohorts had long been insinuating: The United States cannot win in Iraq and must cut and run now or face defeat a la Vietnam. In an interview with San Antonio radio station WOAI, Dean said:

"The idea that we're going to win the war in Iraq is an idea which is just plain wrong...I've seen this before in my life. This is the same situation we had in Vietnam. Everybody then kept saying, 'just another year, just stay the course, we'll have a victory.' Well, we didn't have a victory, and this policy cost the lives of an additional 25,000 troops because we were too stubborn to recognize what was happening."

This is simply reprehensible. We've known since the 2004 Iowa caucus that Dean is just plain nuts. However, not even this can explain expressing such a desire for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. We have been fighting two wars in Iraq: a war against the Saddam Hussein regime and the War on Terrorism thanks to the migration of terrorists to Iraq. The war against the Hussein regime was won long ago.

Now, Iraq has become the latest battleground in our worldwide war on terrorism that we entered on September 11, 2001. The terrorists have come to Iraq to fight us. As Senator Joe Lieberman so accurately explained last week, we are in the midst of a war in Iraq between 27 million Iraqis and 10,000 terrorists. Indeed, not only are we fighting the terrorists, but also real criminals that were freed from prison when the Hussein regime fell. Iraq has a population slightly less than California Could anyone imagine the absolute chaos that would result if California completely emptied its jails and prisons?

We are winning in Iraq. We won the war and now we're winning the reconstruction. In just over 2 years, Iraq has gone from a barbarous dictatorship to a democratic republic that will elect a full-term government in less than a week. We needed several years to establish a democratic German government after World War II and a full decade to democratize Japan.