Curt Schilling in Iraq
Boston Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling has a clear message from the USO tour in Iraq:
We’re winning
I dare ANY media outlet to print that. I dare you because it’s true. The most powerful message I got over there, from every single soldier, was their extreme disappointment that we are not hearing the facts about what they are doing.
Two analogies I thought were ‘appropriate’ in this context.
A table needs four legs to stand, right now Iraq is standing on 2 of its own, and we’re (NATO forces) providing the other two.
A football game with 2 minutes left, right now we have a 3 pt lead, the next year or two will be spent increasing that to 20 or more points. Would you rather play the last two minutes with a 3 pt or 21 pt lead? Which one would you feel was more of a lock?
Make no mistake, when we leave it needs to be ‘a lock’ or else we’ll be sending these brave warriors back into harms way, when we should not have to.
To the war critics:
Before you piss and moan about anything understand we met soldiers from the post at Waleed on the Syrian border (a bad ass bunch of Marines I might add) to the FOBs around Baghdad that were still seeing ‘action’ unfortunately. NOT ONE of them was anything but respectful, and dead set on completing their mission.
So all of you “bring them home now” folks who think you are doing some greater good by saying that, are in effect doing the exact opposite. They want to come home when the mission is done, period.
What winning really means:
It went something like this. They were occupying a Government building in a city that housed senior Baathe party officials pre war. The city was at around 50k in population. Post war the city was about 4000 people. That number had now swelled to over 40k and was growing daily and the US base there was in a building that the mayor of the city, and citizens, interacted with on a daily basis!
These soldiers were still on daily missions and at high alert but over the past 5 months things are changing dramatically. Where they used to spend 24/7 hunting down terrorists and extremists in local communities, they were now out and about helping rebuild vital parts of the city, playing games with the local children and integrating themselves into the communities there. The Iraqi’s were blown away at the fact that these soldiers weren’t demons or something worse.
It’s not over, not by a long shot, but we are winning and people need to know that.
(emphasis added)
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Merry Christmas to our troops. And thanks for all you do.