The Speech
OK, what was that? In sum: "September 11. Central battleground. Stay the course. Hurrah for the U.S. military. Thank you for your sacrifice. Repeat."
If we really have trained 150,000 Iraqis, then why do we keep our 135,000 troops there? Don't Republicans believe in personal accountability? If the Iraqis can't take care of themselves, isn't the occupation a kind of "welfare"? In the sense that we are doing for them what they can do for themselves, or could do for themselves if we didn't do it for them? Or, is this really about defending the U.S., and not exporting democracy? So, then, do we need the Iraqis, when trained, to defend the U.S. against terrorists training there? Do we want to rely on Iraqi defense forces to fight the war on terror for us? OK. Either way, don't we have a problem? Either the Iraqis can't defend themselves, or we can't rely on them to defend us.
Is Iraq sovereign? If so, then are the U.S. forces in country under Iraqi command? If not, then how is the Iraqi government sovereign?
The commanders on the ground say "we don't need more troops." Because if they say the opposite, they get fired. So let's stop pretending that they aren't asking for more troops because they don't want them. They can't ask for more troops.
Just some thoughts.
posted by Number Three @ 8:47 PM
2 Comments:
Thank God I wasn't in the US to watch Bush repeat his hackneyed "Iraq is a part of the War on Terror" crap. Reading the newspapers here in Italy every day I can tell you that the Bush administration has zero credibility on Iraq even in Italy, one the US's most staunchest allies. There have been scathing articles in the newspapers here about the administration finally acknowledging the insurgency may last for several years and how they're actually negotiating with them.
Tack on to this the fact that Italy issued arrest warrants for 13 CIA agents and will no longer cooperate with the US on sharing information because when they did it with a Muslim cleric in Milan, the US violated Italian law and screwed up an investigation by abducting the cleric and whisking him off to Egypt.
It's going to get awful lonely in Iraq by next year for the US. But, of course the insurgents are in their last throes and all those Iraqi soldiers will be trained by then...
Paul
Paul--Don't forget the 30 countries with troops in Iraq. The president actually said that. Just filling you in, seeing how you missed the speech.
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