Battle of "The Bums"

During their mutual month-long August recesses, wherein public confidence in each has plummeted to record lows, the American Congress (“Our Bums”) is denouncing the Iraqi Parliament (“Their Bums”) as “do nothings.” Further, despite American military progress on the ground in Iraq, Washington claims Baghdad’s failure to meet political benchmarks will doom General Petraeus’ plan for victory.

The premise of this claim is absolutely backwards.

Along Iraq’s bloody path to freedom, the greatest obstacle has been the average Iraqi’s wary neutrality in the battle between the United States’ “Coalition of the Willing” and the insurgents. Today, a nihilistic insurgency has been revealed to offer average Iraqis nothing but subjugation and extermination; in stark contrast, General Petraeus’ counter-insurgency strategy is delivering both the eradication of the insurgents and localized reconstruction efforts – i.e., a palpable hope for security and prosperity. Consequently, the true measure of political progress in Iraq is NOT found in its national Parliament; the true measure of political progress in Iraq is occurring in local tribes, towns and provinces where Iraqis are choosing liberty instead of the insurgency.

This Iraqi “election for freedom” is not an intrinsically military development. It is fundamentally a political development complementing and speeding military progress; and hastening the day such individual and local “grassroots” political wins collectively dictate political progress in Baghdad.

Let us, as the sovereign citizens of our free republic, ever remember how in representative democracies Parliaments and Congresses do not dictate to sovereign citizens; sovereign citizens dictate to Parliaments and Congresses. Thus, in Iraq each citizen in his or her respective tribe, town and province must inform and consent to federal laws being enacted, implemented, and honored; and, when this consent is individually granted in sufficient numbers, Iraq will complete its transformational emancipation from tyranny to liberty.

Further, let us, as the sovereign citizens of our free republic, ever remember how we cannot abandon Iraq’s fledgling democracy – or any democracy – under terrorist attack. The War for Freedom must be won through ideological, political, economic, diplomatic and – as an ultimate resort – martial means. If the U.S. abandons Iraq’s democracy, we will also abandon our and the entire free world’s inherited legacy of and professed commitment to freedom. If this betrayal of ourselves and the Iraqis occurs, our enemies will be empowered and we will be ideologically disarmed in the face of the enemy. If not liberty, what political principle will a discredited and defeated U.S. promote to turn the Middle East’s oppressed away from Al Qaeda’s extremism?

Come September 15th then, Americans must focus on the true measure of political progress in General Petraeus’ initial strategic assessment – tribal, local, and provincial support for liberty instead of the insurgency; and we must do so cognizant of the truth expressed and proven by prior generations of Americans who, in times of national trial, preserved and promoted our nation’s revolutionary experiment in human freedom: The only way to ensure liberty for ourselves is to extend liberty to the enslaved.

Of course, it would help too, if the collective bums in both the Iraqi Parliament and the American Congress remembered all power in a democracy is vested in its sovereign citizens, not its subservient government.

United States Representative Thaddeus G. McCotter is the Chairman of the Republican House Policy Committee and one of “Our Bums”