Today we have a guest post by Peace Tree Contributing author, Progressive American.
Recently, an Iraq study group tried to find out what the best strategy for the U.S. is when dealing with Iraq. The results of this study only go to prove that what the left has been saying all along has been correct.
Here is what the study group recommended:
The White House needs to come up with and announce a plan to begin pulling back our troops, whether or not the Iraqis are ready. (Their reason behind this is both brilliant and true. The study group pointed out that keeping American forces in Iraq will signal to the Iraqis that Washington will continue to prop up the Iraqi government with military forces, which would give them no incentive at all to hurry and get their stuff together. What kind of message are we sending to the Iraqis by keeping our forces over there to "help create a stable government." Besides, it is clear that we are not doing very well: Iraq is in a civil war, 72% of the troops think they should be brought back in '07, and we have killed at least 49,642 Iraqi civilians (contradictory to the liars in the Bush Administration, slaughtering nearly 50,000 innocent Iraqis is not helping the people of Iraq.)
In response to the study group's recommendations, the Bush Administration has said:
"This business about graceful exit just simply has no realism to it."
What a load of crap! Of course we can exit. Bush just wont stop terrorizing the Iraqi people and killing our soldiers because he wants oil, and he doesn't want to admit that he screwed up.
Everyone knows that this war is no good. Why do you think Rumsfeld sent a memo to Bush telling him that he needs a new strategy in Iraq? Why do you think that only 31% of Americans approve of Bush? Even Dick Cheney thinks this war is a bad thing. Of course, he won't tell you that now, but if you go back to 1991, he describes the same exact situation we are in right now, and he calls it a 'quagmire.' Here is what he said . . .
"I think that the proposition of going to Baghdad is also fallacious. I think if we were going to remove Saddam Hussein we would have had to go all the way to Baghdad, we would have to commit a lot of force because I do not believe he would wait in the Presidential Palace for us to arrive. I think we'd have had to hunt him down. And once we'd done that and we'd gotten rid of Saddam Hussein and his government, then we'd have had to put another government in its place. What kind of government? Should it be a Sunni government or Shi'i government or a Kurdish government or Ba'athist regime? Or maybe we want to bring in some of the Islamic fundamentalists? How long would we have had to stay in Baghdad to keep that government in place? What would happen to the government once U.S. forces withdrew? How many casualties should the United States accept in that effort to try to create clarity and stability in a situation that is inherently unstable? I think it is vitally important for a president to know when to use military force. I think it is also very important for him to know when not to commit U.S. military force. And it's my view that the President got it right both times, that it would have been a mistake for us to get bogged down in the quagmire inside Iraq."-Dick Cheney, the Washington Institute's Soref Symposium, 4/29/91
See? They know we are in trouble. They are deliberately lying to you and to the rest of America. That's why they refuse to follow the Iraq study group's recommendations.
Here is something else that the Iraq study group said should happen . . .
A gradual pullback of the 15 American combat brigades in
Iraq.
Yet, Bush refuses. He refuses on the grounds of 'terrorism.' But if he would just read all of the recommendations laid our by the Iraq study group, he would see that there is a way to fight terrorism without having our troops killed. The recommendations clearly point out that the U.S. should
use Iraqi forces, and have "special operations" forces to deal with Al Qaeda.
When viewing this, there isn't one person who could honestly believe that we must keep all our troops in Iraq to fight terrorism. Besides, before 9/11 Bush is the one who cut funding for anti-terrorism units, and intelligence. If we would just fund them a little bit more, like we used to (which worked for Clinton, who thwarted several terrorist attacks), and followed the recommendations laid out, we should be just as secure.
It is very frustrating to read a clear plan (that would work) laid out by this Iraq study group and Bush completely writes it off just because he wants to carry out a war that would serve his own interests and the interests of his corporate buddies rather than the interests of America.
If only people would have listened in 2004 . . .
Visit Progressive American at his home blog.
___________________________
Peace y'all
Today we have a guest post by Peace Tree Contributing author, Progressive American.
