What No One Will Say

What no one will say.

We ARE tired of this war. We HAVE lost faith in what appears to be a failed adventure and we ARE bitter that we were led into it dishonestly by people who likely had the best intention but when the truth is manipulated so grotesquely to motivate support...how CAN we believe?

Congress with it’s inept thrashing around is embarrassing. The Democratic “opposition” is embarrassing because no one wants to say what everyone knows. We have lost the heart for occupation and subjugation of this foriegn land. because of our actions, our failure to impose Democracy in Iraq is “letting the terrorists win” and they are going to “come after us” again. This is another big lie. Somehow admitting the obvious is perceived as an electoral death wish

There seems to be a fatal lie that the opposition is believing and that is that to question the war and to talk about withdrawal allows the terrorists to "win." Certainly if I am an extremist religious fanatic I am heartened that the religious fanatics in the Bush administration were thwarted. It is North carolina State winning the National Championship. David beats Goliath. This is a HORRIBLE loss and lets put the blame squarely where it belongs, on this administration. They LIED to us and mischaracterized “evidence” so that they could go to war. Their reasons in 20/20 hindsight appear to be to impose a stable democracy and the blessings of capitalism in the mideast. That is a lofty idea and is the nicest characterization of what those motives were because that was NOT what they told us when they took us in. I will not recount the litany of “weapons of mass destruction”, Al Quaida’s alleged connections,” “terrorist bases”.... and on and on. All debunked because they were simply not the truth.
Bush's Five Big Lies That Led to the Iraq Quagmire.

These are the five lies Bush told that Ralph Nader documented to impeach him. Nader might be a nut but given the choice between Bush and Gore... I voted for him.

• Weapons of Mass Destruction. The weapons have still not been found. Nader emphasized, “Until the 1991 Gulf War, Saddam Hussein was our government's anti-communist ally in the Middle East. We also used him to keep Iran at bay. In so doing, in the 1980s under Reagan and the first Bush, corporations were licensed by the Department of Commerce to export the materials for chemical and biological weapons that President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney later accused him of having.” Those weapons were destroyed after the Gulf War. President Bush's favorite chief weapons inspector, David Kay, after returning from Iraq and leading a large team of inspectors and spending nearly half a billion dollars told the president “We were wrong.” See: David Kay testimony before Senate Armed Services Committee, 2004-01-28.
• Tyler Drumheller, the former chief of the CIA's Europe division, revealed that in the fall of 2002, President Bush, Vice President Cheney, then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and others were told by CIA Director George Tenet that Iraq's foreign minister — who agreed to act as a spy for the United States — had reported that Iraq had no active weapons of mass destruction program.
• Iraq Ties to Al Qaeda. The White House made this claim even though the CIA and FBI repeatedly told the Administration that there was no tie between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. They were mortal enemies — one secular, the other fundamentalist.
• Saddam Hussein was a Threat to the United States. In fact, Saddam was a tottering dictator, with an antiquated, fractured army of low morale and with Kurdish enemies in Northern Iraq and Shiite adversaries in the South of Iraq. He did not even control the air space over most of Iraq.
• Saddam Hussein was a Threat to his Neighbors. In fact, Iraq was surrounded by countries with far superior military forces. Turkey, Iran and Israel were all capable of obliterating any aggressive move by the Iraqi dictator.
• The Liberation of the Iraqi People. There are brutal dictators throughout the world, many supported over the years by Washington, whose people need “liberation” from their leaders too but unless we have a hidden agenda we use those brutal dictators towards our own ends (see China).



When I say congress and the Democrats are inept I mean that they fail to grasp the truth, or honestly acknowledge the truth that anyone watching knows. We have GOT to get out of there and we are going to have leave with our tails between our legs. We are going to leave a disaster which will very likely include a divided Iraq (now seen as a common sense result) and “ethnic cleansing” and “genocide” against the people who are in the wrong places when that division takes place. What Congress needs to realize is that we do not need to be debating it now. Bush is not leaving Iraq. We need to plan for our countries leaving Iraq the day he leaves office and we need to do it NOW. We need to tell the world that at the end of 2008....WE ARE OUT! Until then we have a leader who will continue to pursue his dogged goals “failure is not an option” to whatever end they lead us no matter how strong the American people oppose him. There are so many misconceptions being acted on and advertised by this administration that I cannot catlogue them all. How about the mischaracterization that we are fighting "ONE" enemy in this war. What a gross mischaracterization. We are facing Al Quaida, Sunni Insurgents, Shittes,
Iranian Insurgents and also just some people who want to see us hurt.

And this is what REALLY makes me tired. I believe strongly that a leader MUST have the courage of it’s convictions. He should do what he really believes is the right thing to do regardless of public opinion. The problem is that he has been using manipulated public opinion for the last 6 years and in 2004 with 51% of the vote claimed a “mandate” for his Iraq policy. Well one thing about claiming a mandate is ackowledging that you have lost it. He says the public supported his policy but does not any more but what the public has realized is that this “war” is not a war at all. It is an occupation towards a goal of “winning” which no one can tell you what that means. A war on terror is like a war on drugs. It never ends and can only be held in check by dealing with the symptoms of what lead to to the “problem” whether that problem is drug abuse or terror. Our leadership has no desire to deal with the difficult issues choosing plattitudes of democracy and capitalism “solving” these problems. It is a noble principal. It might work if you were dealing with a country in Iraq that had any concept of it OR if our country had the heart to occupy that country for a lifetime or two. We have neither the heart nor the budget.

So what should we be doing. Every Democrat and republican challenger should announce that upomn election they will begin an immediate pull out from the country of all troops, first withdrawing them back to our bases and then getting them out as soon as possible. Some might go to Afghanistan, some to Kuwait but the great majority will go to Europe and then home. The counrty of Iraq will fail and fall apart. Kurdistan will forment revolution in Turkey and Iran and we will of course try and manipulate that to our advantage stupidly destabilizing those governments hoping they will be replaced by something better. The Shiites will get to work exterminating the Sunnis in some of the bloodiest genocide imaginable and Saudi Arabia and Egypt will need to figure out what to do for their Sunni brothers. We as a country will be further vilified and hated in the Arab world. Our enemies will then get to work on us in Afghanistan...I do not know what will happen there.

We need to retreat. There I said it. I am NOT for isolationism and I do think America has a duty to lead and to a greater or lesser extend protect it’s interests but look at how Bush’s dad it and how Clinton did it. You send out a message that we will come in, do a lot of damage and leave...quickly. With the massive force at our disposal and if people are harboring terrorists they will pay that kind of price. Perhaps over and over again. You want to keep Iraq from nuclear weapons. Spend a billion on intelligence and use it to bomb. Some of these facilities will be among innocent populations. Women and children will die. It will be a tragedy but it is a tragedy our country can live with. Spend your war money on national security. Tighten our borders meaningfully. Enforce our immigration laws whatever those laws might be at the time.

Start speaking the truth to American people. Democracy and freedom costs and it is going to cost so terror at home. We have learned a lot of from 9/11 but as they have in Iraq, the “evil doers” will change their tactics and we cannot become complacent. Imagine a country where we had spent those 100’s of billions of dollars on education, climate change and erradication poverty in our own country. The Audacity of hope...indeed.