The Only Consensus on Iraq: Nobody’s Leaving Right Now
Thursday, November 30th, 2006 by billFrom NY Times
By David E. Sanger
In the cacophony of competing plans about how to deal with Iraq, one reality now appears clear: despite the Democrats’ victory this month in an election viewed as a referendum on the war, the idea of a rapid American troop withdrawal is fast receding as a viable option.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff are signaling that too rapid an American pullout would open the way to all-out civil war. The bipartisan Iraq Study Group has shied away from recommending explicit timelines in favor of a vaguely timed pullback. The report that the panel will deliver to President Bush next week would, at a minimum, leave a force of 70,000 or more troops in the country for a long time to come, to train the Iraqis and to insure against collapse of a desperately weak central government.
Even the Democrats, with an eye toward 2008, have dropped talk of a race for the exits, in favor of a brisk stroll. But that may be the only solace for Mr. Bush as he returns from a messy encounter with Iraq’s prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki.
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“Nobody’s Leaving [Iraq] Right Now”? Who is talking – NY Times’ pundit? Is he one of the same mouthpieces that advocated war in the first place just 4 years ago? Well, at that time Times and its pundits, deafened by the American public’s cheering, did not take in account few clouds on the horizon, a.k.a. Iraqi complex history, economics, ethnical and religious divisions setting on top of the collapsing old remnants of colonial regime in the region providing more than third of the world energy in the least expensive form of oil.
Now, in 2006, accelerated by the all too common gambler’s desire to keep the paper games (no pan intended), American people have to accept that not only “American way of life is non-negotiableâ€, to quote our Gambler-in-Chief, but American way of life is only negotiable, the sooner the better. It is pay back time for our empire builders. Concretely for Gulf area, we have to pay for “successful†installation of Shah in 1953 and for 27 years of denial of Iranian Revolution. We have to pay for sabotaging of all populist movements aspiring to modernize Middle East, supporting medieval regimes pushing Middle East back to 8th century to delight of oil industry.
American people, who thought to keep driving their SUV’s on cheap, now feel that it is time to cut costs and accept that USA, once the majority holder of our planet shares and now is but a minority owner, must act accordingly. So the time is NOW.