Fear of Clowns

I've been among those who have always been against the invasion of Iraq (at least since the UN inspections failed to validate all the terrifying WMD claims made before the 2002-2003 inspections) but supported "finishing the job" of regime change rather than pulling out and leaving Iraq in a worse mess than when the Ba'athists were in control. On 6/14/2005, I wrote,

Had he won, I had intended to give Kerry six months to show progress in Iraq before changing my tune to "bring 'em home now." ... Yet ... I keep thinking it's better to launch a war that ought not have been launched and stay as long as innocents are militarily threatened than invading and saying, "Goodbye, we sorta screwed up, sorry."

Some would argue that our presence there is inciting much of the violence, a point on which I certainly agree. However, if we left, Turkey would likely enter from the north and Iran from the east. Which I believe would be more of a negative than we have now; In fact, it would be a formula for a regional war we'd jump right back into.

Now we're four months beyond that six months I wished to give Kerry and both rationally and intuitively, I feel my position changing to "the sooner we can responsibly pull out, the better. My reasoning:

• It's unconscionable to not include Iraqi forces lost in the fight against the insurgents, and when losses among Iraqi forces are added to "coalition" forces, there is a clear trend of the situation getting worse rather than better
• 80% of Iraqis want us to leave now and 45% support attacks against coalition troops
• Our Commander in Chief is actively ignoring these horrible trends and continues to pledge to keep on the same horrid course
• Our military is great at many things, but under the direction of Bush, it seems completely unable to make progress on the political front of the war. As Bush claimed in the 2000 election, he thinks our military should not be used for political regime change ("nation building"). Nation building should have started years ago, but Bush's attitude seems to bring about a self-fulfilling prophesy: we can't nation-build

My "plan" for Iraq has called for repositioning coalition troops to protect Iraq's international borders and providing air support to Iraqi forces. The most interesting part of John Murtha's idea is to position troops completely "over the horizon" - I assume this means moving our presence completely out of Iraq to friendly nations such as Kuwait, Jordan and Qatar. Combined with the new facts - that 80% of Iraqis want us out now and our being "in" is not improving the situation, but making it worse the only smart paths into the future involve a major shift in strategy - any of which which Bush insanely rejects out-of-hand. Given his adversity to nation building, it looks like we're in for killing more "bad guys" is the only path he's willing to take. But this is clearly not working towards a stable Iraq - the opposite, if anything.

It seems to me that Bush would be more willing to declare victory again and pull out to "over the horizon" where we could both lend air support to Iraqi forces and protect Iraq's international borders. This way, Bush could claim Iraqis are killing the "bad guys" in the name of freedom and Iraqis would be forced to build their own nation and defenses.

It's a bummer that Bush has no confidence in our military doing anything but killing terrorists, but that's the reality. And a policy of assisting from "over the borders" would allow Bush to pretend to save face as if it were the next step in getting Iraq to stand on it's own.

Here is Bush looking for an exit strategy.

// posted by Erik @ 11/20/2005 10:51:00 PM
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