Common Sense

The Iraq Survey Group released its findings to the president today. They called the situation in Iraq “grave and deteriorating” suggesting that we should begin drawing down our troops, including all brigades not essential for force protection, by the first quarter of 2008.

The panel studying the war in Iraq presented its findings this morning to President Bush, who said he would take their ideas “very seriously” and act on them “in a timely fashion,” and then to Congressional leaders.

That’s what I tell my boss when I’m not actually paying attention so we’re probably still screwed.

I’m surprised that they went ahead and recommended pulling out, mostly because that is not the solution the White House would have wanted to hear. It’s really the only solution there is, though. Doing what we’re doing now only escelates the violence, and we don’t have the resources to put enough troops on the ground to make a significant difference. The question isn’t ’should we leave?’ it is ‘how fast do we leave?’

There is no military victory to be had. Any neocon notion of a pax americana in the 21st century has been tragically dashed by the deaths of more than 2,800 American troops. This failed war has cost us more than we can ever possibly know at a time when we needed every resource, every mind available, to fight the ideological threat posed by Islamic fundamentalist terrorism.

All this can squarely be laid at the feet of one man: George W. Bush. Long after it became painfully obvious that the Iraq War was being run disastrously and that it was never needed in the first place, he still pushed on. He has practically flung the bodies of our American soldiers onto the funeral pyre himself, laughing and joking all the way. Long after we knew those soldiers were dying for no causus belli, no reason for war, he has kept us there to satisfy his ego and seal his place in history. Well, he has consigned his place, as well as the place as the great America we once knew, to the scrap heap of history.

Realistically, it will be a decade before we are a serious military threat to any other aggressor in the region. We don’t have the men and we don’t have the materiale to threaten Iran with should they continue their nuclear program. Even if we redeploy, it might already be too late for a serious effort in Afghanistan that would beat the Taliban once and for all.

This war, this unmitigated mistake of egos, has cost us so much. Mr. Bush has rendered us impotent in front of the world at large and ceded our place as the lone superpwer to groups such as the European Union and even Iran. Our spheres of influence are almost nonexistant, the enmity of different regions is palpable.

The voters of America, members of your own party and now even the closest advisors to your own father are girded against you. How can you fail to act, Mr. President? How can you sit and do nothing for so long? Remember, sir, that your job title is not ruler of America and all its people, but that you are our servant.