Pulling Out Of Iraq
11/27/2005
You are in serious denial.
Your question of what equipment should be withdrawn, what destroyed and what donated to the Iraqi government may have some merit. I’m not familiar with military logistics, so I really can’t say.
The rest of your article is saturated with the same sort of hubris that drove the present administration to invade in the first place. It’s not our place nor our right to determine, or even help determine, any future Iraqi legal system. Nor should we be helping them militarily vis a vis their neighbors. If the most powerful military in the world can not successfully occupy Iraq, then Iraq has little to fear from its neighbors. We need to be focusing on our own legal system, which is in serious trouble. Our democracy and freedoms are in jeapordy right here in the US. We can’t afford to be worrying about people all over the world. Let’s deal with the mote in our own eye first.
Beyond the right or wrong of any continuing interference in Iraqi affairs, we’re way beyond your “value-added legacy”. The US will be hated in Iraq for generations, even more than we are hated in Iran for our 1953 intervention. If I’m wrong, and Iraq authentically asks for our “expert” help, then of course we owe them that, along with financial reparations. However, I foresee the situation as being much more akin to that of Vietnam.
A much more important question than what is to happen in Iraq in the future is this: How do we prevent such a catastrophe from happening again, ever? Madeleine Albright once asked Colin Powell what good it is to have such a wonderful tool as our military if we can never use it? We need to turn that thinking on its head. We need to understand that as long as we have that wonderful tool, we will always be tempted to use it. We need to eliminate that capability. We need to cut back drastically on our standing military so it is capable of “protecting” only the homeland. We need a Constitutional Amendment forbidding the deployment of state militias and National Guard troops overseas without a formal Congressional Declaration of War. We need a Constitutional Amendment making it easier to impeach and convict a President or allowing for Presidential recall. The same with Supreme Court justices. The first five I would impeach and remove from the bench are the five who usurped the power of Congress to choose the next President when no candidate has receive a majority of Electoral College votes
(which is what would have happened if Florida had exceeded its time limit during the 2000 election).
This entire system is broken, and nothing shows it more than the fact we have any Democrats at all who even contemplate interfering in the internal affairs of sovereign states. We need to get out of Iraq now and stay out.
Paul Munnis wrote:
Unless America gets out ahead of Post-War, post occupied Iraq, then we will be shaped by their events instead of being able to influence Iraq and the region.
Pulling out of Iraq without a plan for the future is suicide for America.
Nobody is leading in this area. This may be the worst of all possible outcomes for Iraq and the American blood spilled upon that soil.