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The Unholy Alliance
Whereof what’s past is prologue, what to come
In yours and my discharge.
—William Shakespeare,
The TempestOn January 30, 2005, the face of the Middle East changed forever. In the cradle of civilization, whose people had never known self- determination, 8.4 million Iraqis braved attacks by Islamofascist terrorists and chose freedom. Sixty percent of eligible Iraqi voters turned out that day, closely approximating participation in the American presidential election three months earlier (where obstacles were significantly more pedestrian). Only through the noble efforts of the U.S. military, not American politicians, did such a moment occur.
U.S. Air Force major Eric Egland was an eyewitness to this birth of independence. A member of the elite U.S. Improvised Explosive Device (IED) Task Force, Egland and his team of soldiers patrolled the many voting sites around Baghdad in anticipation of the first-ever democratic elections in Iraq. At 8 a.m., just as the voting began, Egland’s group heard an explosion in the area of a polling site they’d visited the night before. A suicide bomber had detonated himself, killing two others in the process.
Egland’s unit responded expecting to find that the terrorists had achieved their desired result: potential voters dispersed and retreating to the safety of their homes. As they arrived at the scene, though, the soldiers witnessed the true nature of freedom and democracy.
The lines of Iraqis waiting to cast their first meaningful votes were not at all diminished by the terror; serpentine queues stretched around the block far beyond the soldiers’ field of vision. “The Iraqis were resolute in their will to vote,” Egland recalled when I interviewed him in Iraq a few months later. “And we watched them file past the remains [of the terrorist] toward the polling booths, some even taking time to loudly curse and spit on the murderer.” The significance of the moment was not lost on Egland, who was serving his country thousands of miles removed from his newlywed and his family. “I will put my faith in a people who, when attacked by a suicide bomber, not only do not run away but gather and stand to face the danger in order to have a say in their future,” he concluded.
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U.S. Army sergeant Joe Skelly of the 411th Civil Affairs Battalion, from Danbury, Connecticut, patrolled the city of Baquba, Iraq, that day. Sergeant Skelly is the American fighting man personified—the citizen soldier that Thomas Jefferson envisioned. He was a professor of history at New York’s College of Mount Saint Vincent, and joined the military after the attacks of 9/11 when he realized his country was at war.
In Baquba, terrorists launched mortars and rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) in an attempt to shatter the will of the Iraqi and American people. Skelly noticed, though, that the Iraqi security forces guarding the election sites had assumed a new posture; they were more engaged, con
dent, and alert. They had “ownership,” he realized. They knew “what’s at stake.”
“In a neighborhood called Al-Huwaydir, near the Diyala River,” Skelly told me, “I saw an elderly Iraqi dressed in his finest suit of clothes proudly walking past us to vote. He was strutting, his head held high, he was so proud, he was going to vote. His quiet dignity was moving. That’s what it’s all about. I knew at that moment that’s why I was there.”
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Fearing democracy and freedom in Iraq, Islamic terrorists from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Iran targeted the Iraqis’ courage and commitment with the maximum strength they could muster . . . and the Iraqis gave them the finger.
Flashing purple fingers to the world, Iraq’s people joyfully announced their entry into the world of freedom and human dignity— concepts they could hardly have grasped in previous generations. With fallen despot Saddam Hussein incarcerated and awaiting trial, the nation of Iraq rose to celebrate the end of thirty-five years of ruthless oppression.
In the summer of 2005, I visited Iraq to see the truth for myself and to talk with American soldiers, whose stories had not been told in the mainstream media. What I was hearing daily from friends and peers engaged in the fight was not what I was seeing or hearing in big media or Congress. I had served as an Air Force officer and pilot for twenty years and been involved in combat operations in Grenada, Somalia, Bosnia, and the Persian Gulf. When I got on the ground, I was overwhelmed with the extremely positive nature of our soldiers’ morale and professionalism. I was equally struck by the emotional commitment of the Iraqi people.
One member of our traveling team, American filmmaker Brad Maaske, was embedded on patrol with the Iraqi Army in a very dangerous former Baathist area of Baghdad’s “Red Zone” when he was approached by a young Iraqi father holding his infant daughter.
“Please bless her,” the Iraqi asked in broken English.
“I don’t know what you mean,” Maaske said.
“Please bless her,” the man repeated and reached for the American’s hands. Placing them on the baby’s forehead, the father continued, “Please bless her with the freedoms that you have . . .
the freedoms of America.” Maaske suspected that he’d walked into an ambush. We had discussed the inherent danger of exactly this sort of scenario on our way to Iraq. Overcome with emotion, though, Maaske knelt over, kissed the child, and blessed her. Her father was beaming. Maaske was too.
On October 15, 2005, the Iraqi people took another dramatic step forward and again thumbed their noses at al Qaeda, as this time 78 percent of the voting-age population walked to the country’s 6,000 polling stations. Where al Qaeda’s soulless butchers had launched 147 attacks to disrupt the January 2005 elections, on this day they were capable of only 14.
Only two months later, in December, 11 million Iraqis elected the most representative Arab government in the Middle East. This was remarkable progress in a nation that had never experienced democracy and had spent nearly a quarter century under the brutal tyranny of Saddam Hussein.
But to the American Left, none of this mattered, just as the first democratic elections in Afghanistan the previous year had done nothing to inspire it. The Left’s leaders expressed no appreciation for, or pride in, their nation’s historic efforts in bringing law and elections to a land devoid of civil rights. Once again, they offered only acrimony and defeatism.
On the very day that Saddam was being arraigned in Baghdad, Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean wildly asserted, “The idea that we’re going to win the war in Iraq is an idea which is just plain wrong.”
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West Virginia Democratic senator Jay Rockefeller claimed that America and the world would be safer if Saddam Hussein was still in power.
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Democratic senator John Kerry, who had come close to becoming America’s commander in chief, slurred our soldiers in an interview with CBS’s Face the Nation. “There is no reason,” Kerry said, “young American soldiers need to be going into the homes of Iraqis in the dead of night, terrorizing kids and children, you know, women.”
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Democratic congressman John Murtha, a former Marine, took the opportunity to call for a pullout of troops from Iraq. On NBC’s Meet the Press, Murtha explained his reasoning: “I’m absolutely convinced that we’re making no progress at all, and I’ve been complaining for two years that there’s an overly optimistic—an illusionary process going on here.”
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On another occasion he said, “We can’t win this militarily,” and added, “The Army is broken, worn-out, and living hand to mouth.”
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Proving there are no depths to which this lawmaker won’t stoop, he then accused U.S. Marines of “killing innocent civilians in cold blood” before an investigation into the incident at Haditha, Iraq, had been completed.
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This was an irresponsible and incendiary claim that outraged soldiers from all services who were proudly defending their nation.
Former president Bill Clinton joined in the pile-on. Speaking just miles from the war zone, in Dubai, Clinton told students that the Iraq War “was a big mistake.” The former president, standing on foreign soil, continued to criticize the commander in chief’s decisions by saying, “The American government made several errors, one of which is how easy it would be to get rid of Saddam and how hard it would be to unite the country.”
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Such comments swelled the chorus of defeatism that had been heard since the early days of the war. It didn’t matter that the United States went into Iraq with overwhelming congressional authorization, with the support of 70 percent of the American public, and with the consent of the United Nations (which had failed to enforce seventeen separate resolutions against Saddam’s Iraq). The Left quickly reframed America’s justification for combat to meet their reality, launching a ceaseless campaign of vindictive anti-American, antimilitary rhetoric.
Even when the gruesomely decapitated bodies of Americans were shown on international television swinging from a bridge in Fallujah, the Left could muster no outrage toward the enemy. The incredibly influential leftist blogger Markos Moulitsas Zúniga of Daily Kos wrote of the American civilian contractors, “I feel nothing over the death of merceneries [sic]. They aren’t in Iraq because of orders, or because they are there trying to help the people make Iraq a better place. They are there to wage war ...
