No, Mr. President: The Iraq War Is Not the American Revolution | The John Birch Society - Truth, Leadership, Freedom

Gary Benoit writes:

The president’s high praise of our modern-day citizen-soldiers who are willing to leave their homes and place themselves in harm’s way to defend our freedoms is well deserved. Tragically, however, through no fault of our soldiers, they are not being used to defend our freedoms, despite the president’s claims to the contrary...

Yes, our “men and women of the Guard” do stand ready to “fight for America.” Yet many of them have been maimed and killed in Iraq for reasons unrelated to defending our beloved country in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks...

If America were attacked by Iraq on September 11, then the Congress should have immediately declared war against Iraq. But that is not what happened. Iraq did not attack us, and Congress did not declare war.

In fact, as President Bush himself acknowledged on September 17, 2003, months after our invasion of Iraq was launched, “We’ve had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with the September 11th [attacks].” Even today, that admission may sound surprising to many Americans who mistakenly believe we went into Iraq because Iraq attacked us here. After all, in his public speeches, including his recent Independence Day speech to West Virginia’s Air National Guard, President Bush has repeatedly juxtaposed references to Iraq with that of 9/11. These juxtapositions have created the false impression that Iraq had attacked us, without the president actually saying it...

Today’s freedom-loving patriots who wear the uniform were deployed overseas to attack a country that did not attack us, and they are there now propping up a new regime that, unlike Saddam Hussein’s old regime, is closely aligned with Iran, a radical Islamic terror state identified by President Bush himself as part of an “axis of evil.”

“We must support the Iraqi government,” Bush declared in his July Fourth speech. Yet that government, which would never have come into existence without American blood and treasure, could prove worse than the admittedly despicable regime it replaced.

“If we were to quit Iraq before the job is done, the terrorists we are fighting would not declare victory and lay down their arms — they would follow us here, home,” Bush warned on July 4. But what job is supposed to be completed in Iraq? Originally, Bush repeatedly stated that we needed to go into Iraq to enforce United Nations Security Council mandates forbidding Iraq to possess weapons of mass destruction. But no WMDs were found. We also, according to Bush, needed to rid the world of Saddam Hussein’s regime, but Saddam Hussein is now dead. And now we supposedly need to prop up the new Iraqi regime in the midst of what has become a civil war, until such time as that regime can take care of itself.

President Bush may glowingly cite the American War for Independence and the Founding Fathers when he trumpets his Iraq policy, but the truth of the matter is that his Iraq policy runs totally contrary to the intent of the Founders when they fought the War for Independence and later drafted the Constitution.

Bush is not upholding American independence by launching an offensive war against a foreign nation. He is not defending our freedom by sending our troops abroad to put in place and then prop up an increasingly radical Islamic regime in the midst of a civil war. He is not even helping the victims of the civil war by doing that.

The Founding Fathers recognized the follies of interjecting ourselves into foreign quarrels and warned against it. “It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world,” George Washington wisely counseled in his Farewell Address to the nation.

In an Independence Day address in 1821, John Quincy Adams said: “America goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own…. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standards of freedom.”

Does that sound like a description of what’s happening in Iraq? It obviously does not sound like President Bush, who certainly is not on cue with the Founding Fathers.

Nor is President Bush emulating the Founding Fathers when he behaves like a king, sending the nation into war without a congressional declaration of war. The power to declare war, recall, was assigned to Congress — and Congress alone. The Founding Fathers assigned this power to Congress because they did not want a single man to be able to plunge the nation into war as Bush has done (and as other modern-day presidents have done before him).

Our modern-day citizen-soldiers should never have been sent to war against Iraq, and they should not be there now. If we truly want to celebrate the Founding Fathers who won our independence for us, and support our modern-day citizen soldiers who have been placed in harm’s way in Iraq, we would bring our soldiers home — now!

No, Mr. President: The Iraq War Is Not the American Revolution The John Birch Society - Truth, Leadership, Freedom