This money isn’t all for Iraq, either (much of it goes to clean up Afghanistan) nor will this be the final price tag. But a little perspective: our federal budget is $2.2 trillion – or $2,200 billion. Of that, maybe $400 billion – about 18% – is spent on protecting citizens of the United States of America from planes flying into their office buildings. The rest goes to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and all the other entitlements, which are supposed to make the country a socialist utopia but never do. Those programs dwarf what we spend on defense.
Terrorists are flooding to Iraq in great numbers because they know that a free, open, democratic country in the Middle East will have ramifications of biblical proportions. And defense is one of the few things the federal government is authorized to do under the Constitution! It’s time to face reality. If you think that Iraq and Afghanistan are the only places we’re fighting the war on terrorism, you need a dose of reality. We are all over the world in this. There are Americans infiltrating, sabotaging and listening to these terrorists from Buffalo to Bombay to Bosnia. The press is parroting the Democrat talking point that Bush doesn’t have an “exit strategy.” This is the latest of these gravitas-type things the left invents simply so they can say Bush doesn’t have it. There’s definitely an exit strategy, which the president has articulated: a rebuilt, free Iraq functioning on its own.
The left doesn?t like that exit strategy because it’s bad for their political power, but that’s what it is. We want to get the heck out of Iraq and Afghanistan as quickly as we can. We’re not going to get out of those nations prematurely and claim a false victory for election purposes and then have it all fall apart. If one of these Democrats was running for reelection in 2004, he or she would claim victory just to receive the accolades, knowing full well we’re nowhere near ready to pull out. Bush is not going to politicize the liberation of Iraq at this stage, because that’s just not who he is. We’re not going home until we win. Everyone understands that – except people who don’t want to.
