They stood up; we should stand down
Didn't somebody say something like "as they stand up, we'll stand down" about Iraq a few hundred dead GIs ago? Here's the headline in today's Chicago Tribune: "Iraq stands up against U.S." I suppose That Person just quoted didn't have this "standing up" in mind, but there you are.
Mind you, it is their country. Two converging thoughts come to mind:
Mind you, it is their country. Two converging thoughts come to mind:
- “They are in charge.” Well, they should be. Are they in charge enough for the US military to come home? BushCo wouldn’t submit US military to a UN command, but he will submit them to the orders of an Iraqi leader who is strongly tied to one of the violently competing factions. It is way past simple irony now: they cannot make peace, yet they will now let us know where and when to go. Not that we can make peace either. The US military presence hurts more than it helps, and it certainly can't operate at the beck and call of al-Maliki. Bring them home.
- Why was the US military besieging Sadr City for the past week? How much of Baghdad was the US shutting down on behalf of one captured soldier? What are the implications of this for the larger war effort and the blooming civil war in Iraq? Where is the military strategy here? (One thinks of a recent Presiden-shul press conference in which Himself talked about strategy, or tried to.) Don't get me wrong, I admire it that the military tries to take care of its own and I grieve for the soldier and his family-- but it's not just one, is it? If the point of a huge US military operation in a war zone verging on civil war is simply to attempt to discover one missing soldier, then there is no point to our presence there. Bring them home.
Cut and run? No, I don't think that is exactly what we should do. But neither does stay and bleed seem like much of a strategy. The US mission in Iraq is past the point of any particular useful or effective point. Figure out a way to bring the soldiers home-- soon.
posted by ChiTom | 10:09 AM
2 Comments:
ChiTom, while I agree with you that it was a bad decision from the start to shut off Sadr City, the meme that's most likely to have the biggest political clout is that, on the orders of a corrupt premier in a crumby little failed country, Bush has abandoned a brave American soldier and left him to die in the hands of the evil enemy. Where's his hairy chest and muscular posture now?
That, of course, assumes we're willing to stoop to blatant demagogery.
Thanks, WallDon. I agree with you on the clout issue.
But over 100 died there in October as you know, and for what exactly? His Presidential hairy chest-- what else?
It is the metaphorical abandonment of all 140,000 troops there to fight what is at best a delaying action (with no real goal they are delaying for) that has my attention right now.
Maybe, to paraphrase Barry Goldwater, demagoguery in the pursuit of withdrawal from Iraq is no vice. (When was the last time we cited Barry in Scatablog, I wonder?)
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