Remember when you turned on the news in late August 2005 and saw this?
Remember how the government did virtually nothing to protect the people of the Gulf Coast? Well…it’s a pattern. The administration never plans ahead. They had no plan for the occupation of Iraq and they won’t even discuss whatever plan they might have to get out.
WASHINGTON – The Pentagon told Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton that her questions about how the U.S. plans to eventually withdraw from Iraq boosts enemy propaganda….
“Premature and public discussion of the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq reinforces enemy propaganda that the United States will abandon its allies in Iraq, much as we are perceived to have done in Vietnam, Lebanon and Somalia,” [Undersecretary of Defense Eric] Edelman wrote.
He added that “such talk understandably unnerves the very same Iraqi allies we are asking to assume enormous personal risks.”
Clinton spokesman Philippe Reines called Edelman’s answer “at once outrageous and dangerous,” and said the senator would respond to his boss, Defense Secretary Robert Gates.
I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again. The best argument for staying in Iraq is this: Do you trust these guys to plan a coherent withdrawal?
If I were Rove, I’d point to that picture of Hurricane Katrina and ask the American people if they trust them to get our troops out of harms way.
