America Supports You?

Today is Armed Force Day. "America Supports You" is the theme. I guess that is the question Congress is wrestling with as the leadership tries to maintain the fiction that they support the military while depriving the military of what it needs to win in Iraq.

The Tank notes that the political pressure to retreat from Iraq is highly destructive of civil-military relations:

That there is a single representative or senator in Washington invested in defeat is revolting, let alone a driving force of them. And they wonder why those in military service so distrust them. Today we are witnessing the worst fears of American military men and women.

Remember in 1999 when the military was accused of dragging its feet in deploying to Albania to be ready to intervene in Kosovo? That hesitation and reluctance on the part of the military was created by a history of being sent to Vietnam to win only to be pulled out to lose and by being sent to Somalia to win and then being pulled out to lose. The Gulf War's speed was seen as the only acceptable way we could fight--before public and Congressional support eroded.

We luckily didn't have to fight a long war in the Balkans. But the debate over the continuation of the Iraq War has rekindled the military's fear of being sent to war to win only to be yanked back prior to victory. And this fear is there despite the Congressional declaration of war and clear public backing of the mission in 2002 and 2003. If this gold-standard of public and legal support against such a clearly evil thug as Saddam Hussein can unravel, where can the military count on unwavering support?

Which is why I am angry with the Darfur advocates who would never stay for the long haul when the going gets rough if we listen to them to "do something" to stop that slaughter.

And the unseemly eagerness to surrender is not the wish of the American people:

Democrats are quite correct that the 2006 elections signaled public ardor for a new direction in Iraq. What they misread — or, better, what they are frantically trying to manufacture — is a purported national consensus about what that new direction should be. Yes, there is indisputably a vibrant antiwar movement. Thanks to its sympathetic media megaphone, it is influential beyond its numbers. But for all its sound and fury, that movement makes up only a portion of those demanding a “new direction.”

For the rest of us, the desired new direction is the word that is such anathema to both the Left and the foreign-policy establishment: Victory.

The public wants victory. While the Leftist fringe may be happy with defeat, the majority of the public prefers that we win. Oh, there may be a short-live relief that our troops aren't fighting and dying in Iraq, but eventually the humiliation of defeat will sink in with the public and they will not forgive the Democratic Party for providing that defeat. And the military will feel this immediately.

One day, a Democratic president may wish to send troops to a war either in our national interests or in the interests of humanitarian impulses. If these same Democrats compel us to pull out of Iraq prior to victory (and Afghanistan will be next if we pull out of Iraq), I guarantee that it will be a generation before our military trusts the civilian leadership to send it to war.

In the end, the military will go where sent by civilian leaders, but it will drag its feet to avoid paying in blood for the whims of a civilian leadership that one day wants war and the next wants to avoid thinking about what war and victory mean. Our military knows that "America supports you" is a slogan that is too easy for politicans to abandon--even when the military is in the field fighting.