E-mail from Iraq Makes the Rounds

You remember the e-mail that I got from the military specialist from Mosul yesterday? Well, that letter has made the rounds now, from this program last night to MSNBC’s Scarborough Country, Pat Buchanan filling in. He also had as a guest the former undersecretary of defense Lawrence Korb, and we have two bites here. The first is Buchanan playing an excerpt from this program of me reading the soldier’s letter, his e-mail, and then Korb’s… I don’t know if it’s Korb’s reaction or not. I’m not sure if these things happened sequentially, but, anyway, they speak for themselves. Here’s Buchanan and the way he treated the excerpt of the soldier’s letter from yesterday.

BUCHANAN: I want to introduce now something Rush Limbaugh had on his radio show today. A U.S. soldier in Mosul near the attack apparently watched the news coverage of this attack and was absolutely dismayed. He wrote an e-mail letter to Mr. Limbaugh. Here is Rush reading part of that soldier’s letter. The soldier we will keep anonymous.

RUSH ARCHIVE: (Rush reading soldier’s email) I am disgusted with what I am seeing. It seems to me that the liberal media is just thrilled this happened so it gives them a good headline to make Bush or Rumsfeld look bad. Don’t these people get it? This is not just about politics in America. In fact, it was never about politics until liberals — notice I don’t say Democrats, Mr. Limbaugh, but liberals — was never about politics until liberals made it that way.

RUSH: So Buchanan then asks a question of Lawrence Korb. “As we pull out of there, aren’t we pulling the plug and inviting a hellish disaster for this country, meaning Iraq?” And I guess — I didn’t see the show last night — but I guess one of the discussion items was whether or not, because of this attack, and I predicted this yesterday, “We gotta get out of there. Oh, no. This is not what we bargained for. This is not the way to go, oh, we gotta get out of there,” and I guess there was this sentiment expressed last night on the Scarborough show that Buchanan was hosting. Here’s Korb’s answer to the question.

KORB: Well, we were inviting a strategic disaster as well as a moral disaster. I don’t think if you can go into a country, get rid of the regime and then say, “Well, gee, it’s not working out. We’re leaving.” I don’t think this is the kind of people we are. But on the other hand, I think you’ve got to start thinking about how you’re going to get out. I don’t see an exit strategy. The general said, “Well, we’ll wait until the Iraqi security forces are stood up.” Well, we don’t know how long that’s going to be. One of the things that unites all of the insurgents, they have various different viewpoints, is the American occupation.

RUSH: Well, of course it is! What is so worthy of guest expertise for that comment? Of course it unites them. We knew this going in. They’re not insurgents. These are full-fledged terrorists and they’re being paid for largely from money secreted out of Iraq prior to Saddam’s leaving office, and that money probably went to Syria is on its way back funding these terrorists and so forth. But, you know, again, I have to put all this in perspective, and I just wonder, you know, even with the severity of this attack in the chow hall this week, these kinds of things were not those kind of events that forced us to consider getting out of World War II. We don’t think about getting out of wars before we win them, until Vietnam. I don’t recall — well, maybe Korea to a point — but, you know, World War II, World War I we didn’t say, “Oh, well we got to get out of there we just had a devastating loss.” We didn’t think about getting out of there until it was over. The exit strategy is victory. What’s so hard about this? It’s always the exit strategy.
See this is the problem with the Vietnam War, folks, and this is the problem with people who were in their young, youthful days then coming of age, and that was the formative experience of their lives and so every war ever thereafter is Vietnam to them. It’s unwinnable, it’s unjust, it’s immoral, we shouldn’t be there, and the first sign of trouble, we should go. And this is not the first time they’ve said we ought to get out. This is not the first sign of trouble. But it’s remarkable to me that we have such, apparently, — I don’t know how large, but it’s a sizable contingent of elitist leftists — actually this doesn’t surprise me now that I say it this way — whose view of America is such that we can’t win wars and we don’t deserve to win wars because the wars we get in are unjust. And so this notion, “Well, we gotta get out of there, we can’t leave now, we’ve got to find a way to get out, we need an exit strategy.” None of these people ever consider victory. They’re so obsessed with doom and gloom, so obsessed with negativism; they don’t even factor victory as an exit strategy. And make no mistake, that’s what our exit strategy is, folks.
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