Update [2005-6-16 10:4:13 by susanhu]: It’s Keith Olbermann’s top story tonight, 5pm & 9pm PT: “A resolution backed by North Carolina Republican Rep. Walter Jones and Hawaii Democratic Rep. Neil Abercrombie, calls for the Bush administration to develop a plan by the end of this year to pull out all American troops from Iraq and to begin the withdrawal by Oct. 1, 2006.” (MSNBC)
Breaking: Coalition, working with congressmen, begins push for Iraq pullout
The groups stand behind a resolution introduced today by a bi-partisan group of members led by Rep. Walter Jones (R-NC) and Rep. Neil Abercrombie (D-HI. It calls for the Bush Administration to announce a plan for the withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Iraq by the end of the year and to initiate the plan as soon as possible.
Win Without War, the national coalition, includes groups such as MoveOn.org, the National Council of Churches, True Majority, Sojourners, Working Assets and the National Organization of Women. They plan a grassroots campaign to pressure Members of Congress to sign onto the resolution. … More below:
Exerpts from the press release provided by Raw Story:
“We are pleased that there are members of Congress from both political parties who are willing to speak for the strong majority of Americans who believe it is past time to start bringing our troops home from Iraq,” said Former Congressman Tom Andrews (D-ME), National Director of Win Without War. “The administration’s policy in Iraq is failing. There is no light at the end of the tunnel, only the lights from oncoming trains in the form of daily suicide bombings and ambushes. It is time to start bringing our men and women in uniform home.”
According to a Gallup poll released last week, three-quarters of Americans support a withdrawal of some or all troops starting immediately.
“The administration says the 140,000 American men and women in uniform will leave only when Iraqi security forces can do the job of battling the insurgency. But this is not an ‘exit strategy.’ U.S. military forces are a continuing incitement to nationalist insurgency and regional anti-Americanism. We are locked in a battle against an insurgency that can be continually replenished and will fight to the end to get the United States out of its country. For every insurgent killed, three take his place,” Andrews said.
U.S. Generals are now quoted as saying that training Iraqi security forces could take two years or more. Others privately say this is optimistic. Iraqi security troops, although growing in number, are not gaining in effectiveness.
“Iraq’s future will be determined by how the political struggle among its factions plays out. The U.S. military occupation only complicates, and defers resolution of that struggle,” said Susan Shaer, Co-Chair of Win Without War and Executive Director of Women’s Action for New Directions. “Meanwhile, over 1,700 American soldiers have been killed in Iraq. Many tens of thousands of Iraqis have also died,” she said. “It is a truism that there are no longer any good options in Iraq. The question is how long will U.S. policy makers pursue a failing policy at an unacceptable cost, human and financial. It is time the Congress demand a plan for a phased withdrawal of U.S. forces,” Andrews said.
Um. This sort of implies that there were, at some point, good options in Iraq. I suppose that’s true, but how far back would we have to go? Perhaps to the point when the US first started to support Saddam Hussein in the mid 1980’s?
I think that that might be good “framing” … it’ll be more inviting to people who once supported the war as well as to those who didn’t like the war but thought we should stay until we got things better.
I know this has been discussed elsewhere, ad nauseum, but I haven’t managed to come up with an answer that satisfies me. Given that we can’t change anything that’s already happened, what do we now owe the Iraqi people? I don’t want to see another person killed in this war, and I certainly don’t want more US troops to die, but part of me can’t get away from the idea that ‘you break it, you buy it.’
Iraq was not a great place before this war, for two main reasons. First, they had a repressive dictatorship – very bad. Second, the country had been totally decimated by the first gulf war and a decade of sanctions. Before Gulf War I, Iraq was basically a first-world country. For example, they had a first-rate health-care system, with state-of-the art hospitals and fantasic doctors (many of whom were women). The ‘smart bombs’ of the first war targeted not just military installations, but also water treatment facilities, hospitals and other institutions necessary to civil society. The sanctions (and various peripheral phenomena such as corruption) created an environment where rebuilding the civil society was impossible. The water was undrinkable, the electricity sporadic, the hospitals broken and unstocked. Children died every day of diarrhea – a completely preventable and treatable condition – because they got sick while playing in the sewage-filled street with no shoes.
Things were very, very bad. But still, there was a measure of stability. We took that measure away and have created a civil war that will explode if we pull out. We’re not doing them any favors by being there in the first place, but a hasty pullout will only make it worse.
I ask again: what do we owe the Iraqi people?
Some people have suggested that the U.N. take over, with ample funding from the U.S.
I’m sure that would be the best possible situation (assuming this government would agree to it, which they never would), but do you think that other countries would be willing to send in troops now? Even if it isn’t a US-run show anymore, it’s still a meat-grinder.
We can’t go back in time. It’s going to be a huge mess no matter what and, if the U.N. were to take over, there’d be soldiers from Sri Lanka, India, African countries, the Phillipines, being killed.
That’s what I’m saying – it’s a huge mess no matter what, but it will get a lot worse if we just pull out. So either our soldiers can continue to die (in the current fashion, or under the command of a UN coalition) to keep things at the current level of messiness, or they can come home and live, but Iraq goes up in smoke. I honestly don’t know what the right thing is here.
Me either 🙁 And I’ve been with you in worrying about what would happen if U.S. troops pull out.
Frankly, I don’t think there’s a snowball’s chance in hell of the U.S. pulling out. For one thing, the neocons have too much at stake in the region.
I think you’re caught in a delusion that’s hard to break out of: that we are, despite everything, a decent, intelligent, benign, sane country. We’re not. We can’t make other places better because we have opted to send out own place down the toilet.
What do we owe? We owe the same thing the Manson Family owes, or Dr. Mengele owed: arrest, conviction, and maximum punishment of the perps, plus reparations for the damage and death we brought. We need Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and a whole bunch more spending the rest of their lives in jail, and we need to send the Iraquis a whole bunch of money with a mea culpa and apology. Then we need to let them pursue their own destiny, whatever it may be. It was never any of our business, and it isn’t now.
We need to get over the idea that we’re something special and just quietly hang our heads in shame while the intelligent and sane parts of the world try and lead the way to something better.
Let’s say you’re a mean little boy. You pull girls’ hair and throw rocks at squirrels and you pick on the little kids and laugh.
Now let’s say you have a dog. It’s an unhappy dog because you’re a mean little boy and you pick on it. It gets unhappier and unhappier and finally turns mean itself. Your parents see what you’ve done to the dog and realize what a rotten kid they’ve got on their hands. They have a choice: keep the dog and try to minimize the havoc it wreaks on the neighborhood by containing it, or just let it go and say ‘poor thing – we were wrong to let our son have a dog. we’ll just let the neighborhood figure out what to do with it, since some of them are nicer than our son.’
Just to be clear: We are the parents. W is the kid. The insurgency in Iraq is the dog. The Iraqi people are the neighborhood. We created this mean dog. Are we going to let it loose or try to contain it? Either way, it’s not going to disappear.
the wrong assumption perfectly. If we are the parents, we are psychopaths whose little bastard kid represents exactly who we are and what we wanted. We stole the house we live in in the neighborhood, which is praying for us to just pay us back for the damage and get our sorry, murderous asses the hell out. We are not sane enough to do anything useful about the dog.
so you think we should just set it free? i agree there isn’t a good option, and we certainly aren’t going to win any awards for sane behavior.
i don’t think we can make things better – but i do think we can make them worse.
An arsonist burns down your house, killing your nastyass bastard of a daddy. But he was your daddy. The arsonist was very good at burning down your house, but there’s no evidence that he’s been good for much of anything else for at least half a century.
So do you tell him to rebuild your house and then come be your new daddy? That make sense to you?
I already said what we should do. Make the arsonist pay way past the point where it hurts, put his ass in the worst penitentiary you can find, and then make our own decisions about what to do with the ashes and who to live with. We might well make wrong decisions and end up even worse off than before the house burned. But they’ll be our decisions, and even though we might be fucked up, we’re not as fucked up as the arsonist.
Oddly enough, I have a couple of sisters-out-law (*) who recently agreed to foster an abused dog. The parents pretend that the dog “just turned mean”, though it was pretty clear from the dog’s behavior (and from similar behavior from a previous dog) that the kid had a lot to do with it. Now, the parents should just ‘fess up to the kid’s role, but they won’t. And the kid sure won’t. Even if they did admit their responsibility, the dog won’t get better as long as it’s in that household. (Not even if you fostered the kid out.)
So my sisters-out-law have volunteered to take the dog and help it recover. It wasn’t in any way their responsibility, but they’re taking it on anyway, because they care about dogs and if anyone can help that dog, they and their pack can. If the parents wanted to do the right thing, they wouldn’t have brought the dog home in the first place. But they did. What they should do at this point — though they won’t — would be to offer to help my sisters-out-law pay for vet bills and such.
Analogies can be taken to far and maybe this one has. But there you go.
((*) Ob: They’re my “sisters-out-law” because their sibling and I are partnered, not married. So, “sisters-out-law” instead of “sisters-in-law”.)
Excellent point. If I may continue to stretch – in this case, your sisters-out-law (who sound like fantastic people, by the way) would be the UN.
Not necessarily the UN, though that’s certainly the obvious possibility. Another possibility that’s been suggested is some sort of pan-Arab force. Though that seems pretty unlikely to me.
The problem with any sort of hand-off is that the Bush League (a) can’t admit to wanting something like this unless they still get to call the shots and (b) has so poisoned the reputation of the US that nobody wants to get involved as long as the US calls the shots. The number of countries still willing to be part of the Coalition of the Willing is decreasing.
(And yes, my sisters-out-law are fantastic people.)
They deserve their country back, end the occupation.
They need money or rebuild, money will go further with their people, instead of bush’s overpaid contractors.
Put a coalition together of the UN, Amnesty Int, and the Red Cross, for example; to watch the money. Just an example, their must be some relatively honest organizations out there.
America needs to get their Keisters out of Iraq, and consider shipping the responsible politicans there, for interogation by the people of Iraq. One-way ticket should do it.
Damned if you do and damned if you don’t. What a cluster fuck. sorry about the language but lets call the illegal agressive occupation what it is. A GD Cluster Fuck!! Thanks Georgie!
He has been the one shining light in this mess on the television. I am so grateful for The Countdown!!
I wrote to him to thank him for covering this. And i told him’ I’m going to miss his Michael Jackson puppet theatre. It was so cute and silly.
How is this different from the House vote on May 25 on an amendment to the DoD authorization bill, offered by Representative Lynn Woolsey (D-CA) calling for an exit strategy from Iraq? Pelosi and a bunch of other Democrats voted against that one.
Is there to be bickering even amongst the anti-war members of government?
One Coalition that should grow. I do hope that they also demand that the repsonsible parties are held accountable. A mistake made with the Vietnam War, that should not be repeated. HOLD THEM BASTARDS ACCOUNTABLE !! for their CRIMES !!