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Our troops are the world’s greatest humanitarians and liberty’s last best hope; we must stop short-changing their efforts. I believe that is Michael Yon’s message in his Wall Street Journal op-ed:

Soldiers everywhere are paid, and good generals know it is dangerous to mess with a soldier’s money. The shoeless heroes who froze at Valley Forge were paid, and when their pay did not come they threatened to leave — and some did. Soldiers have families and will not fight for a nation that allows their families to starve. But to say that the tribes who fight with us are “rented” is perhaps as vile a slander as to say that George Washington’s men would have left him if the British offered a better deal.
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The Iraqi central government is unsatisfactory at best. But the grass-roots political progress of the past year has been extraordinary — and is directly measurable in the drop in casualties.

This leads us to the most out-of-date aspect of the Senate debate: the argument about the pace of troop withdrawals. Precisely because we have made so much political progress in the past year, rather than talking about force reduction, Congress should be figuring ways and means to increase troop levels. For all our successes, we still do not have enough troops. This makes the fight longer and more lethal for the troops who are fighting. To give one example, I just returned this week from Nineveh province, where I have spent probably eight months between 2005 to 2008, and it is clear that we remain stretched very thin from the Syrian border and through Mosul. Vast swaths of Nineveh are patrolled mostly by occasional overflights.

Me:

Those who say this is George Bush’s war are fooling themselves. We have it to do, this War on Terror, now, maybe later, but surely for generations against this enemy. Like war and warriors or not, hippie or hawk, America will fight, be forced to fight, or die as a nation. That is the reality of this enemy’s intent.

Calling for the end to the ever-oscillating size of our military is no jingle from the peanut gallery. I was there, in uniform, during both the post-Vietnam and post-Gulf War reductions. Knee jerking overall troop levels up and down plays all too well during political campaigns (the post-Gulf War “peace dividend” was a surge that became an avalanche). Arid regions and deserts are hard to fight and maintain in for both men and equipment.

However long it takes, we need to finish the fight in Iraq, stay strong in the region, and win for their sake as well as our own.

Note: Read more from Michael at his web site MichaelYon-online.com

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