COUNTERCOLUMN: All Your Bias Are Belong to Us

I just sent the following letter to the President and all of my Congresscritters:


Gentlemen,

I am a definite voter in your district, and I am writing to urge you not to lose the political will to win in Iraq.

We have been at war in Iraq less than three years -- not enough time, even, to meaningfully assess the performance of a stock mutual fund, much less the effectiveness of the strategy of "draining the swamp" by bringing democracy to the Middle East.

The strategy we now have will work, but it will not happen quickly. The Iraqi Army is now training its own NCOs and is in a position to grow exponentially now that the critical training infrastructure is in place, and they now have a corps of battle-tested NCOs to train new troops themselves.

But it take years to develop a functioning battle command and staff at battalion, brigade, and division level. I have 13 years commissioned service and a combat tour in Iraq, and I strongly urge that we stay the course until the train-up of the Iraqi Army is complete, they have developed staff and command levels, and until they are fully capable of taking the fight to the enemy and winning.

I further believe that if we try to short-circuit this process and retreat prematurely, we will have demonstrated ourselves to be what Bin Ladin already suspects we are - a paper tiger which does not have the stomach for a fight.

Friends and foes will notice this alike. China will adopt a more aggressive policy towards Taiwan, and North Korea will feel free to pursue brinksmanship against South Korea and the United States.

We will lose allies and cooperation in the middle east as area governments will feel the need to pursue non-aggression pacts with terror groups on the ascendancy in Iraq. And countries like Libya, Syria, and Sudan will feel free to restart their own WMD programs - in Syria's case, needed as a hedge against Iranian power.

And Israel, absent a credible American security umbrella, will feel a good deal of pressure to launch preemptive attacks, destabilizing the Middle East far more severely than any US presence in Iraq could concieveably accomplish. And it will be a generation or more before the United States can lead a coalition in a risky venture with an uncertain outcome.

In short, I believe a premature withdrawal from Iraq will augur a rapid and significant eclipse in American military, diplomatic, and economic power.

This is a "must" issue for me. I will support representatives who are robust and strong in supporting the war on terror, and I will do everything in my power to see that representatives who lose heart, who adopt defeatism, and who lack the courage to see us to victory go down to electoral defeat.

Sincerely,

Jason Van Steenwyk

You can write' em, too. This NRA-ILA web feature makes it easy: You just enter your zip code and you can write them all at once.

Please don't cut and paste, because I don't want to lose credibility by being accused of astroturfing. Besides...whattaya wanna cut and paste for? Most of you are smarter than I am, from your emails.

(P.S., Don't be a rock-hugger. You know MoveOn.org is mobilizing its hordes. And you also know they're willing to cheat. We must meet the threat head-on, and establish rapid intellectual and numerical superiority.

The first part isn't hard. The second one can only be accomplished with an all-hands effort from all boots on the ground.)

Splash, out

Jason