Pulling out of Germany, sixty years on

Varifrank has one of the best and most insightful pieces I have yet read on the whole idea of pulling out of Iraq, and the fact that we are finally “pulling out” of Germany.

…At this point the story of the end of World War II would end the way a thousand other wars had ended. But something happened at the end of this tale, something no one would have guessed, and it was something wonderful that should give us all hope.

People in America could see that the people of Germany weren’t superman, and they weren’t animals either. They were people. They were as much victims of Hitler as anyone else was. Harry Truman found it hard to hate the Germans after seeing their people crawl through the streets of Berlin.

The world faced a choice at the end of the war. Punish the Germans for their crimes, or let them up easy, feed them, give them their dignity and let them into the family of man as equals.

Despite the advice from others, we chose instead to feed the Germans. We chose to invest in their country, creating industries that would directly compete with our own. We learned to say please and thank you to people we had only recently worked so hard to kill. The result of this simple idea was that the world saw a miracle happen. A country that still showed the scars of war in 1960 became an economic powerhouse, not because of their military, but because they didn’t have one. They didn’t need one.

They had friends; they had us.

And now, were going home. Not out of anger, not because we’ve been driven out by “German freedom fighters”, but because the war waged against Germany by the Soviet Union is over and our purpose there has been fulfilled. Our troops are needed elsewhere. We’ve kept our promise to the German people and they’ve renounced warfare as a method of policy.

There will be no reporter “know it all” touting our departure as a failure of the Truman Doctrine, because our departure shows that it worked. We bet on the German people to be able to overcome all that they had going against them, and the bet has paid off.

We are “pulling out” of Germany, but you won’t hear it described that way. The term “pulling out” is reserved for special uses in the mind of the press.

…

There is now an effort underway by the left to turn victory into defeat. The people who once argued we only went to Iraq for the oil are already screaming that we are leaving, and by calling it a “pullout” it acts as a preemptive attempt to set the tone of the debate, to say that we’ve lost when in fact, we’ve won. The Iraqis have won. They still have their oil, and now they have their dignity.

The world bet that we wouldn’t expose our soldiers to fire to remove a dictator, and they were wrong. The world bet that we wouldn’t leave if we did invade and again, they were wrong. The world said that the Arabs couldn’t be trusted to vote and yes, they were still wrong. The world said that civil war would break out, once again, wrong. They said that the Shiites, the Sunni and the Kurds could never make a working government, and yes, once again, they were wrong.

Of course, being wrong every single time should be no reflection on the lefts intelligence, but it should cause us to evaluate their value in the debate.

Our bet was on the Iraqi people, and we were right. We bet that the Baathist Tikriti Clan wasn’t really made up of 10-foot tall supermen but snickering little losers who once they lost the support that fear and intimidation gives would either be killed or locked up by the people they once exploited. We bet that Iraqi people weren’t animals. We bet that they were just people, and that like people everywhere, no matter their faith, no matter their condition, that they would choose freedom to tyranny.

Leaving Iraq in 2006 is not a defeat, it’s a victory.

I cannot excerpt it and do justice to it. Just go read it all.