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January 25, 2008
Profiles in Countermoonbattery: John Matel
Posted by Dave Blount at January 25, 2008 10:23 AM
John Matel leads the Provincial Reconstruction Team in Anbar Province. He has some instructive insight into the success of the Surge:
It may take a while for the magnitude of this to sink in. I can walk around in the same places where heavily armed American & Iraqi forces could not safely walk only months ago. Here the debate has shifted to providing everyday services such as sewer, water and electricity. Marketplaces where insurgents dumped headless bodies last year are now crowded with shoppers. Children are returning to school instead of being abused by terrorists and coerced into deadly activities. What a difference a year makes!
Sometimes you just have to win. Some conflicts just need to run their courses and some bad guys just need killing. Nazi ideology was not discredited UNTIL it was defeated on the battlefield. No amount of peaceful persuasion or appeasement worked. People thought communism was a viable alternative to the free market UNTIL it ignominiously collapsed. Massive economic evidence and even the presence of a very large and deadly wall running down the middle of Berlin did not convince the believers to abandon their failed ideology. Earlier forms of terrorism from the Barbary Pirates to the Bader-Meinhof didn't go away until they were defeated. We tried appeasement in the 1930s and we tried ignorance in the 1990s. These things did not work.
Like General Petraeus, Matel would no doubt be denounced as a liar by the Democrats who after voting to send our troops over there, have done everything possible to derail their efforts — the same Democrats who could be running our country a year from now.
If we were to fail in Iraq, it's inevitable that the enemy would follow us home. But our worst enemies are already here.
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If only things were going as well on the home front. |
Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.
