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Iraq: A New Valley Forge? Philip V. Brennan Let's for the moment put aside the outrage sparked by the activities of the craven congressional Democrats as they work their way towards a shameful surrender to the forces that seek to butcher us all, and instead engage in a little fantasy that might help illustrate exactly what is happening here. I'll set the scene. Gen. George Washington and his all-but shoeless army is shivering in the cold in Valley Forge while the mighty British army are warm and comfy in their winter quarters in New York and Philadelphia. For Washington, the outlook is grim — he has lost battle after battle, outmaneuvered and outgunned time after time. Except for Trenton, almost his entire campaign from the crushing defeat at the Battle on Long Island to the long retreat down the East coast had been a disaster. He had recently been beaten at Germantown and the British had occupied Philadelphia, formerly the home of the Continental Congress, which had fled the city before Lord Howe arrived. According to ushistory.org's The Philadelphia Campaign, 1777 "No battle was fought at Valley Forge ... It was here that the Continental army was desperately against the ropes — bloody, beaten, battle-weary — and ready to quit. Even Gen. Washington conceded, 'If the army does not get help soon, in all likelihood it will disband.'" According to ushistory.org's incredibly detailed history of the War for Independence "Early into the six-month encampment, there was hunger, disease, and despair. Raw weather stung and numbed the soldiers. Empty stomachs were common. Cries of 'beef' echoed throughout the camp. The future promised only more desperation and starvation.Some couldn't take the cold, hunger, and uncertainty any longer. There were dozens of desertions. Disease debilitated. Death descended in droves." Congress was unhappy with the way the war was being fought, and especially with General Washington's leadership. That's the way it was in the winter of 1777. Here's how it could have been. Story Continues Below
A faction which controlled the Congress saw what they thought was an opportunity for their side. Long opponents of George Washington and his supporters in Congress, never fully in support of the goal of independence from the British Crown, they looked at the deplorable situation in Valley Forge and considered the overwhelming strength of the British and their army, the most powerful in the world and at London's massive resources and they decided that the war was unwinnable. They began to insist that since the war had been poorly planned, the colonists had been misled into believing they could defeat the British, that it was a hopeless mess and could not be won militarily, the only way out was to negotiate. As more and more Americans were killed or died of starvation, they escalated their rhetoric until it reached the point where actions and not mere words was required. All the while insisting that they supported the colonial troops at Valley Forge and elsewhere they decided to stop funding the war, thus denying George Washington the tools he needed to continue to fight. Faced with the loss of the support he needed, Washington disbanded the army and retired to Mt. Vernon to await the inevitable arrival of British troops who would arrest him and send him to England to be tried for treason against the Crown. And today, instead of saying God Bless America we'd be saying "God Save the Queen," our sovereign, and often visit the statue of Lord Benedict Arnold, the Crown's first governor general of our 13 colonies. From his prison cell in London, George Washington revealed that no matter how bad the situation looked in that bitter cold winter of '77 he had a plan to win the war and left alone by Congress he could have put it to work and prevailed against Britain. His plan: rebuild his ragged army into a first class fighting unit capable of winning a war, even one against the mighty Redcoats. He knew what his troops were capable of - Trenton had proved that. They had whipped the Hessians, a group of professional soldiers. He put it into action. As ushistory.org wrote "by February the weather eased somewhat — moving from brutal to merely miserable. In March, Gen. Nathanael Greene was appointed head of the dismal Commissary Department and magically food and supplies started to trickle in. By April, Baron von Steuben, a quirky mercenary who was not really a baron, began to magically transform threadbare troops into a fighting force. Also in April ..., a plot to remove George Washington from power, was quashed for good. May, brought news of the French Alliance, and with it the military and financial support of France. "On June 19, 1778, exactly six months after they arrived, a new army anxious to fight the British streamed out of Valley Forge toward New Jersey. They had been transformed from Rebel into a Mature Army." That army, with the help of the French, won the war. "At Valley Forge, we read of words like 'sacrifice' and conjure up images of bloody footprints, but the concept of suffering for freedom isn't easily understood," the authors recalled. That concept is not understood by the majority of the American people, who if the polls are correct, want us to retreat in the face of the enemy, to quit the battlefield, and leave it to the enemy in the futile hope that having defeated us in Iraq, they will be satisfied and leave us alone here at home. They won't. They are at war with us. They keep telling us that. To them, victory in Iraq is just the beginning, a battle in a long war which won't end until one side or the other wins. Whether or not we should have gone into Iraq is a question no longer worth thinking about. We are there now, and what happens there is all that matters. Despite the rhetoric of John Murtha and his allies, their concept of redeployment means nothing less than defeat. And defeat in Iraq means the war goes on and sooner or later comes to our shores. When the U.S leaves Iran, perhaps armed with nuclear weapons, and al Qaeda come in, they get hold of the oil and our economy suffers a serious blow. The entire region explodes, the Saudi government collapses and with it our oil supply from that nation. Like George Washington, George Bush has a plan. Admittedly is a final attempt with no guarantee it will work. But it deserves a chance. Moreover, we'll know in at the very most, six months. Don't we have the patience to wait even that short a time? This is our Valley Forge. Do we have the courage to stick it out as those ragged, starving, shivering colonial warriors stuck it out? Don't we owe them that? Phil Brennan is a veteran journalist who writes for NewsMax.com. He is editor and publisher of Wednesday on the Web (http://www.pvbr.com) and was Washington columnist for National Review magazine in the 1960s. He also served as a staff aide for the House Republican Policy Committee and helped handle the Washington public relations operation for the Alaska Statehood Committee which won statehood for Alaska. He is also a trustee of the Lincoln Heritage Institute and a member of the Association For Intelligence Officers. He can be reached at pvb@pvbr.com. Editor's note: Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
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