A Year of Our War?
By Travis K. McSherley [January 2004]

It shouldn't be too hard to come up with a defining event for the world in 2004.  After all, nearly every newspaper, television news program, and Internet news site had near-daily coverage last year dedicated to the U.S.-led war against Iraq and the Saddam Hussein regime.

Granted, there have been plenty of big newsmakers during the last 12 months, but none have been so pervasive as Gulf War Part Deux.  In the early weeks of the year, the talk was all about how/when/why the U.S. would attack.  From March to May, it was all-day, all-the-time war coverage, thanks in large part to "embedded reporters" who joined the troops on the battlefield.

And since President Bush's triumphant speech on board a U.S. aircraft carrier on May 1, pundits and reporters have still been ablaze with stories about terrorist attacks on our troops and the ongoing questioning of whether the nation was right to attack -- and how long before we pull the soldiers out.  Such reflection is, to a large degree, healthy.  War is last-resort choice, and can never be an easy one.  And just as in any conflict, this war provides plenty of insight into how to better manage the battlefield and how to, God-willing, prevent the next war from taking place.

Yet amazingly, after a quick and successful drive through the Iraq countryside, after an incredibly swift conquest of Baghdad, and even after the capture of the tyrannical Hussein, naysayers still stretch all bounds of logic to suggest that we should have stayed out of Iraq (and in some cases that we should get out immediately).  Not that everyone isn't entitled to his opinion.  But unfortunately, the Bush administration and others seem almost apologetic at times for taking the nation to battle.  Mistakes were made, certainly.  Failures of strategy and failures of intelligence no doubt cost our nation many lives -- with the loss of each a tragedy beyond words.  But the President -- and the United States as a whole -- must not forget that our cause was, and is, just.

It should go without saying by now that this war did not start from Kuwait last March.  It started in New York City and Washington in 2001; it started on a U.S. ship in 2000; it started at the World Trade Center in 1993.  And we could go back even further.  Saddam Hussein's regime has been a shadowy figure in global terrorism through all of these horrific events (and many others).  Sound intelligence links Iraqi officials to most of those attacks, not to mention Hussein's well documented rewards program for Palestinian suicide bombers.

But where are those pesky weapons of mass destruction?  Didn't they form the entire basis for Bush's war?  No -- but they did form a large part of the argument, and rightly so.  Bill Clinton and many others claimed emphatically during the 1990s that Saddam Hussein had WMDs and was trying to get bigger and better ones.  In fact, it seemed to be common knowledge that Hussein was armed -- right up until George W. Bush made the suggestion.  With that in mind, there are only two real possibilities: Hussein either 1) had weapons or was getting them, thus supporting a decade's worth of U.S. intelligence, or 2) he fooled us all.

If he didn't have WMDs or the capability of acquiring them (which is a laugh, considering the widespread jokes about how easy it is to by nukes off the black market from Russia), then the coalition forces took out a brutal dictator who was only a threat to his own people -- which sounds an awful lot like our mission in Kosovo a few years back.  But if Hussein did possess the weapons that the intelligence community suspected, then that should make the question of "where are they?" even an even more urgent issue.  Are they buried beneath the Iraqi desert (under which we've already found some hidden goodies, including, arguably, Hussein himself)?  Are the in the hands of Syria, or a terrorist group?

The obvious truth is that Hussein did hold an arsenal that, in the very least, was a threat to his neighbors, including Israel.  We know this because he fired illegal Scud missiles at coalition targets during the war, and no doubt would have launched more at Israel had U.S. soldiers not pre-empted.

The threat was too real to go ignored any longer.  President Bush acted, along with a couple hundred thousand men and women in uniform -- and we owe them infinite gratitude.  Has the threat ended?  Of course not.  Terrorists have been continually vigilant within Iraq and against Israel, particularly.  They are surely scheming to bring more blood to U.S. soil as well, in the name of their god.

We are not at war with every adherent of Islam, of course.  But some Muslims do claim to be at war with every adherent of Judaism or Christianity, and we will fail miserably if we don't recognize this spiritual .  Let us not forget, though, as General Jerry Boykin was vilified for proclaiming, that our God is stronger than Allah, or any other god.  Let's praise Him indeed.