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♠
“James A. Baker III, the renowned foreign policy realist, looked realism in the eye -- and blinked. The Iraq report he co-authored with Lee Hamilton recommended many things, but shied from the most realistic one of all: Get the hell out as soon as possible.”
-- Richard Cohen for The Washington Post
All the discussion that we can get suggests that just bugging out is not a possibility. I have to respect that there is a certain morality in that: having broke Iraq, we must restore it - notwithstanding how Iraq was not all that fine before. It's just that short of a few hundred thousand troops and ruling with a colonization-like iron fist, I do not see how Iraq can be restored, and Americans continue to bleed and die in that Mesopotamian mayhem.
I now wonder what the politics of this bloody mess will look like when the 2008 elections come around. Maybe the Administration will get affairs in Iraq on track by then with these half-measures, but if they do not, will we have more policy commissions drawing up yet another new way forward - a new slogan? Considering what popular opinion was like on the Iraq war in the 2006 elections, one could fear revolution on the streets, unless a presidential candidate made a sure promise of pulling out the troops immediately upon election. Or might the public be inured to slogging through the Iraq quagmire?
Mr. Bush, you have two years to make something work, or at least to look like it is working. Godspeed! It must help to be a man of faith, for we have some mountains to move.
xXx
“James A. Baker III, the renowned foreign policy realist, looked realism in the eye -- and blinked. The Iraq report he co-authored with Lee Hamilton recommended many things, but shied from the most realistic one of all: Get the hell out as soon as possible.”
-- Richard Cohen for The Washington Post
All the discussion that we can get suggests that just bugging out is not a possibility. I have to respect that there is a certain morality in that: having broke Iraq, we must restore it - notwithstanding how Iraq was not all that fine before. It's just that short of a few hundred thousand troops and ruling with a colonization-like iron fist, I do not see how Iraq can be restored, and Americans continue to bleed and die in that Mesopotamian mayhem.
I now wonder what the politics of this bloody mess will look like when the 2008 elections come around. Maybe the Administration will get affairs in Iraq on track by then with these half-measures, but if they do not, will we have more policy commissions drawing up yet another new way forward - a new slogan? Considering what popular opinion was like on the Iraq war in the 2006 elections, one could fear revolution on the streets, unless a presidential candidate made a sure promise of pulling out the troops immediately upon election. Or might the public be inured to slogging through the Iraq quagmire?
Mr. Bush, you have two years to make something work, or at least to look like it is working. Godspeed! It must help to be a man of faith, for we have some mountains to move.
