AMERICA IS SUPPOSED TO BE ABOUT HEROES
By Don Bendell
The America I grew up in was in black and white and was all about heroes. Most of them were cowboys, like John Wayne, Roy Rogers, or the Lone Ranger. America and “hero” used to be synonymous. Now, to most of our enemies around the world, America has become synonymous with “sucker.” Why? Because many of those with political ambition have no clue about being a statesmen anymore. They sell out the commander-in-chief and our troops for the sake of trying to get votes. They want to appear to be heroes so we will vote for them. How? It is simple, they do their best to rock the boat, so that each can make us believe that he or she is the only one who can save us from that raging storm. They try to become the great American hero, but real heroes never even realize they are heroes. When a real hero does things that really count, they never stop to count them. And on their sidelines stand our irresponsible news reporters, each seeing themselves as a media hero, the next Woodward or Bernstein, and they each do their best to paint these negative naysayer’s with a brush of courage, however their paint is often cloudy yet very transparent.
Saddam Hussein’s senior advisor and air force deputy commander General Georges Sada, wrote a book called SADDAM’S SECRETS, (Integrity Publishers, January, 2006), http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1591454042/002-1686959-8032066?v=glance&n=283155, in which he tells how a dam in Syria collapsed causing destruction and loss of life, so when the president of Syria, Bashar al-Assad, asked Saddam for assistance, Hussein used that as an opportunity to smuggle his weapons of mass destruction out of Iraq along with aid supplies. More specifically, they were taken out in 56 sorties on 747 and 727 commercial jets. Fearing US discovery, he also sent more into Syria by truck convoys to be hidden there. Previously, according to the General and other Hussein advisors and Iraqi leaders, like Ali Ibrahim al-Tikriti, Saddam Hussein had WMD’s hidden in schools, mosques, banks, homes, and moving in trucks all around the country to prevent UN weapons inspectors from ever finding them.
Top Secret Senate Intelligence Committee reports, just declassified and released this week by US Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte, show that Saddam Hussein, Usama bin Laden, and the al-Qaida did indeed have a close fiscal and logistical relationship going all the way back to the early nineties, that bin-Laden visited Hussein in Iraq, and that Hussein agreed to training terrorists in Iraq in explosives and other terrorist’s endeavors with the goal of attacking US and Israel. Most Presidential candidates, the ones who were in Congress, knew all about this, but feign ignorance just so they can keep taking shots at the President and the Administration and further their own political ambitions.
We are winning the war in Iraq, decisively. Most insurgents now refuse to even shoot at us, just use IED’s, (which are “booby-traps” for us common folks), and of course homicide bombers. “Ooh, Syriana, what a nice son you had. I remember him before he was all blown up!” But they are becoming better at Psychological Operations than, us much better. They play our news media like cheap fiddles and use the short-sightedness of our so-called political leaders as their most effective propaganda tool. I won’t even mention Hollywooden-heads. Ask the soldiers who are there, especially Specops personnel who know what really is going on. Iraqis want us out, yes, Iraq is their country, their home, and they have pride. That is great, but most all of them love us and appreciate what our troops did for them, and want us out only when the time is right.
But our faux heroes and negative press want to compare Iraq to Vietnam? However, the real-life facts don’t jive with their propaganda. For example, in 2005, every single one of the Army's 10 divisions exceeded their re-enlistment goal by 136% to 178%. This has never happened in US history. Remember Tom Brokaw’s “greatest generation” from WWII? We even needed the draft then. Not now.
Our fighting men and women are all volunteers, and are indeed heroes. President Bush is, too. Never has the White House been so besieged, but he has stayed the course, despite poll abuse, despite having horrible taste in picking PR people, despite the daily character attacks by the wish-they-were’s and want-to-be’s. Like the wounded cowboy in a black and white movie, with a quiet strength and a Technicolor positive outlook he has tried to lead us forward, warning us this would take a long time and would be a tough fight. He asked us to be strong and patient, but those with political ambition have learned well from public dissent in the past, and so have our enemies. They remember well the words of our former enemy General Vo Nguyen Giap, commander of all Communist forces during the Vietnam War in his 1985 memorandum of that war, when he wrote “…if it were not for the disunity created by…stateside protests, Hanoi would have ultimately surrendered.” So our enemies remember and hang in there, waiting us out, wanting us to implode from within, while self-absorbed politicians embolden and reinforce them with their criticism and negativism, plus play right into their hands with the word “sucker” invisibly tattooed on their foreheads.
They think they are the heroes. Our future leaders? They each say they have what it takes, but what that really means is that they want to take what we have, but not just our money, although most all of them coincidentally suffer from acute Spendicitis. They want to take our security, our confidence, or whatever it takes to get them elected, while their cheerleading squad in the media want that coveted Pulitzer. But in so doing, they each climb over the bodies of dead American and Iraqi military heroes to what they envision as their rightful perch in world history. You know “perch,” like what vultures use.
We are at war. Do you want John Wayne, with a black and white view, in the White House, or do you want a pretend hero with rose-colored glasses and the latest media poll to make his or her decisions? I’ll take the Duke.