Answers for Senator Zell Miller - installment 4
Fourth in a series, series begins here, here is index

Sen. Zell Miller, D.-Ga., has a piece in the Washington Post today asking the president some questions that he says his Georgia constituents have asked him about a potential campaign against Iraq. Herewith their questions and my attempt at answers, not on behalf of the administration, but only me.

(4) What happens after we take out Hussein? How long will our soldiers be there? And, again, with whose help?

We are already working with the Iraqi National Congress and other Iraqi groups that oppose Saddam to shape post-Saddam Iraq. We will work to emplace, train and support a democratic government there.

Make no mistake: this endeavor will not be an expeditionary one. American troops will be in Iraq for a long time. We don't know how long. It will be expensive in both lives and treasure.

In 1941 we did not ask these questions because we knew the extraordinary danger to our nation posed by the Japanese Empire and Nazi Germany. They attacked us with conventional armies and weapons. Today there is no nation that hope to prevail against us in conventional warfare. But we still have enemies who pose extraordinary danger to us. Three thousand of our fellows perished a year ago at their hands, 700 more than the Japanese killed at Pearl Harbor, who were all military personnel. But our dead of this war are almost all civilians who had no inkling that they were marked for death.

AL Qaeda spokesman Suleiman Abu Gheith wrote last June 21:

We have the right to kill four million Americans - two million of them children - and to exile twice as many and wound and cripple hundreds of thousands. Furthermore, it is our right to fight them with chemical and biological weapons.

World War II ended with clearcut, decisive victories over Japan and Germany, yet 57 years later US forces remain in both countries. I cannot imagine President Franklin Roosevelt worrying on Dec. 8, 1941, how long American troops would remain in Japan or Germany once the war ended, nor any member of Congress protesting that such information was necessary.

You need to understand something: our present enemies want to kill us. Japan bombed Pearl Harbor to prevent the US from impeding its hegemony over greater East Asia. Saddam wants to establish hegemony over the entire Middle East and is developing WMDs to employ against anyone who stands in his way, including America. Al Qaeda's intentions are clear: they simply want to kill as many Americans as possible. They have said so over and over.

After the end of World War II, Europeans discovered that in 1925 Hitler had laid out his plans in detail in his book, Mein Kampf. Hitler's plans, including his hatred of the Jews and his desire to exterminate them, as well as his plan to invade the east and destroy the populations there, had literally been an open book for 14 years before the war.

The aims of Osama bin Laden and his allies are also an open book. They have made their objectives explicitly clear, over and over, in their interviews, their writings and their clerics' announcements: they want to kill as many Americans as possible and destroy as many structures as possible that are most valued by Americans. That is their goal - it is their only goal. Their murderous violence is not a means to another end. Destruction is itself their end. They have said so themselves. Intelligence services and diplomats of moderate Arab states have made it clear that if and when al Qaeda obtains atomic weapons, they absolutely will use them to kill Americans.

The stakes are far too high even to ask questions such as how long will it take or when will the troops come home. The very lives of perhaps millions of Americans are at risk.