A Soldier's View of the ISG

Okay this is probably like a chain-blog, nonetheless it is a soldiers view from reputable string of Conservative Blogs.

I found this at Blogs for Bush with a pedigree that stretches to Powerline.
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A Soldier's View of the ISG

Blogs For Bush

December 08, 2006

We stack up one soldier against the members of the Iraq Study Group, and guess who comes out on top? (From Powerline via Dean's World)

After watching the Iraq Survey Group press conference today I am a firm believer that all politicians are idiots. Okay well not all of them but they all have a problem understanding reality. If any politician is reading this now feel free to email me and we’ll go out for coffee and I’ll further explain. But I digress.

The Iraq Survey Group’s findings or rather, recommendations are a joke and could have only come from a group of old people who have been stuck in Washington for too long. The brainpower of the ISG has come up with a new direction for our country and that includes negotiating with countries whose people chant “Death to America” and whose leaders deny the Holocaust and call for Israel to be wiped from the face of the earth. Baker and Hamilton want us to get terrorists supporting countries involved in fighting terrorism! If I am the only one who finds something wrong with that then please let me know because right now I feel like I am the only person who feels this way.

Not only are the findings of the ISG a joke but the people who led the group (Baker and Hamilton) treat soldiers like they are a joke. One of the main recommendations of the ISG is to send more troops to Iraq in order to train Iraqis so they can secure their own country, but they don’t feel that we are doing a good job of that right now because training Iraqis isn’t an attractive job for soldiers to do because it isn’t a “career advancing” job. As someone who trained Iraqis from time to time I take personal offense to this remark. In my experience soldiers clamored for the chance to train Iraqis. Any soldier who doesn’t think training Iraqis is worth their time because it isn’t a “career advancing” job shouldn’t be part in the war on terror plain and simple.

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I feel like all of my efforts (30 months of deployment time) and the efforts of all my brothers in arms are all for naught. I thought old people were supposed to be more patient than a 24 year old but apparently I have more patience for our victory to unfold in Iraq than 99.9 percent of Americans. Iraq isn’t fast food--you can’t have what you want and have it now. To completely change a country for the first time in its entire history takes time, and when I say time I don’t mean 4 years.

Talking doesn’t solve anything with a crazed people, bullets do and we need to be given a chance to work our military magic. Like I told a reporter buddy of mine: War sucks but a world run by Islamofacists sucks more.

Imagine a world in which we allow our troops to do their bit unfettered by mental hand-wringing and various forms of giving aid and comfort to the enemy from the left here in the United States - it is a world where we would then turn towards Iran's mullahs and say, "do you want the same?". RIght now, what we're saying is, "make things messy for a couple years and you'll find a large portion of America's leadership wetting its pants and wanting to get out at any price".

I heard today on the radio that President Bush is going to give a major speech before the end of the year regarding Iraq and the War on Terrorism - I pray that it is a throwing down of the gauntlet, both to our enemies abroad and our critics at home. This is war, and it is a war we can lose to our destruction if we allow it.
The troops are ready to fight on to victory, President Bush retains a large measure of support among the politically active and I do believe that we can rally a majority in favor of victory if we just do it.