We can't leave Middle East too soon

By DENNIS ANDERSON Valley Press Editor

That is called a wish rather than a plan, a policy or a strategy.

It's an earnest GI sentiment, right out of the Heartland, uttered before the war, and just after hot combat. "When do we go home?"

The truth? For some, not for a long time.

Spouses of 3rd Infantry Division soldiers recently got so ticked off that they protested because of the Army's extending the tour of duty for "Rock of the Marne" troops to use them to suppress Iraqi guerrilla terror. The extended tour interfered with family vacation plans.

It's a symptom of how deeply the "family support mission" has impacted the mind set of military families that there was hell to pay over the idea of scheduling war around leave time.

Americans, including those earnest, forthright, yearning-for-home GIs, like to be told the truth. They respect people who tell it like it is. They daily earn with their service the right to be told the truth by their leaders. Without assuming that role, here are some facts that should withstand scrutiny.

Few wars have been so short in duration or so merciful to most of the combatants assigned to both sides of the conflict.

Entirely too many people were killed, but fewer people were killed than in previous global bloodletting ever before in history. The high technology of U.S. forces so reduced the number of enemy casualties that many of them survived to take a second shot at us.

The United States nearly prevailed in imposing the Chinese strategist Sun Tzu's prescription for fighting without having to wage a bloody, Pyrrhic war.

U.S. commanders bombarded Iraqi officers with e-mails and leaflets that warned them that heavy resistance would be futile and fatal. So many Iraqi Republican Guard soldiers fled in the face of the U.S. advance that little carnage could be found amid the hundreds of tanks and armored carriers destroyed on the road to Baghdad.

I wondered when I was rolling through Iraq with the 1498th Transport Co. why there were no bodies in or near the destroyed armor that was abandoned outside Baghdad. Time Magazine reported - accurately - that most Republican Guard troops and their officers fled even as U.S. air power was devastating the combat power of the Iraqi forces - the tanks and armor that Saddam Hussein used as a club against his neighbors.

In a morbid irony, some of Saddam's henchmen still are exacting a toll, killing and ambushing our GIs in the Baghdad suburbs precisely because Saddam's troops were dealt with so mercifully that they could live to return and fire RPG rockets at our guys after "major combat" ended.

It is an outrage that GIs and British troops are living in as much mortal danger as they were during the war because we refrained from killing more of Saddam's killers.

There is another refrain, from President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, that bears hard examination. "We'll be there as long as it takes, and not one minute longer," the Bush team choruses.

That chorus should end, and U.S. troops and all citizens deserve more candor about U.S. planning, costs and intentions for the long haul in Iraq.

The first cost of war is blood, the cost in life and the toll of injury and wounds, to body, mind and spirit. Since May 1, every week, a few GIs have been coming home in body bags. In a perverse way, the "not a minute longer" utterance from Rumsfeld-Cheney et al contributes to the atmosphere that makes our soldiers targets for terrorists.

Those are hard-core, murderous SOBs shooting at our troops. When the fanatics and "holy warriors" hear something that makes them think they can outlast us, they are encouraged to keep fighting.

Let's let them know we're not leaving, and if they keep it up, they will pay with their lives, not ours. Let them know we are not leaving, but we will kill them anyway.

Actually, the recently vacated Army chief of staff, Gen. Eric Shinseki, spoke with a good deal more truthfulness about what the deal will be in Iraq if we really intend to pacify the Middle East. Shinseki, a whipping boy for Rumsfeld in his last two years, forecast a need for in excess of 100,000 U.S. troops and said they would be needed for years to come.

Rumsfeld didn't like how that would play for the American people, but it's true, and people are entitled to the truth when they are called upon to back America's play with the lives of their sons and daughters.

The American people also should be pointedly informed that the cost of paying for a safer America will be the expense of a large Middle East garrison for the foreseeable future.

Families of the National Guard and Reserve, who provide vast quantities of MPs, truckers and other support troops, know there is a high cost attached to the mantle of citizen-soldier.

Hometowns in America, including the communities of the Antelope Valley, are going to be contributing troops to the Middle East for years. If we want a more peaceful future in that bad neighborhood, with fewer opportunities for growing terrorists, we will be in Iraq just as we were in Germany and Japan.

We still quarter troops in Germany and Japan, and the world is safer because we stayed for the 50-plus years it took to get them to wishing we would just leave.

The peace and prosperity of Europe and Japan were provided by the umbrella of American troops. That is forgotten now, but the world community should be reminded of it often.

People who have hope for real peace in the Middle East hope we will stay for a long time. "If you succeed in Iraq, the entire region wins," a Syrian named Abdul told me during a dinner in Kuwait City. "If you fail, we all fail."

The man, a true moderate, is a middle-class professional who wants a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians. Like the vast majority of moderates in the Middle East, he wants an end to dictators and the possibility of a better life in the region.

"Above all, there should be freedom. True freedom," said the scholarly man who fled Syria for Kuwait decades ago. "We have some freedom, but not all is free here. Freedom is everything. In the United States, people have freedom. That is why it is better to live there if you can."

After World War II, France and Germany were a smoking ruin, two nations of "old Europe" that waged war on each other virtually every generation since the Millenia. The only thing that ended their thousand-year fratricide was American boots in Berlin and the formation of NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

The NATO alliance stared down the Warsaw Pact, averted nuclear war and provided more peace and prosperity than Europe has ever experienced in its studiedly violent history.

Europeans who consider themselves sophisticated and peace-loving today forget that some of their grandparents shoveled other grandparents into ovens until Allied forces rolled into the death camps with tanks and troops.

Then, NATO troops stared down the custodians of the Gulag Archipelago until that truly evil empire collapsed of its own weight.

It's a similar situation in the Middle East today.

Someday it'll be a better neighborhood. But not just yet. Now, it needs a street cop with a big stick, and the numbers of superpowers with dependable allies has dwindled to the U.S.A. and who? The British, of course, and curiously, all the new democracies of the former Warsaw Pact nations are contributing troops to help out in Iraq.

The Poles, the Czechs, the Slovaks and the Romanians despised Saddam, so similar to the dictators they overthrew just a few years ago.

Meanwhile, all that stuff a few years ago from George W. Bush on the campaign trail that "the U.S. can't be the world's policeman" turned out in the aftermath of 9-11 to be a lesson that needed further and deeper study.

If we are to avoid the sword of Damocles posed by terrorists who are seeking nuclear weapons, the avoidance of mass destruction is going to depend on the United States being an extremely effective world policeman.

Who you gonna call? France?

Three weeks ago I trudged across an airfield we bombed, then captured, north of Baghdad called Camp Taji, now a home for the 4th Infantry Division. My Cal National Guard buddy, Peter Mavropoulos, looked around and sized it up. While F-15 Strike Eagles took out the Iraqi Air Force hangars, they left undamaged the runway tarmac. Blackhawk helicopters were using the airfield.

"Used to belong to the Republican Guard," he said. "Now, we'll make it nice."

Maybe not Home and Garden TV nice, but nicer than it was under the previous landlord.

Anderson recently traveled across Iraq with an Army unit of Antelope Valley troops from the California National Guard, the 1498th Transportation Co.