It’s time to start bringing our troops home from Iraq
After leading us into war under false pretenses, the Bush administration has dug us a deep hole in Iraq. The litany of mistakes is endless: the failure to send enough troops, the botched de-Baathification, the refusal to stop looting in the aftermath of the invasion, the firing of the Iraqi army (essentially telling hundreds of thousands of young Iraqi men, “You’re fired, get out of here, we’re not going to pay you, and take your weapons with you!”) – and especially the Republican Congress’s refusal to do any oversight of the war.
Norm Coleman, as chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, didn’t even hold a single hearing into contracting by Halliburton and other corporations – while waste, fraud, and the misappropriation of billions of dollars torpedoed the reconstruction of Iraq. Every dollar that didn’t go towards getting up the electricity and the water, taking care of the sewage, and putting Iraqis to work alienated the population and fueled the insurgency, making a difficult mission impossible and sending the country into total chaos.
And today, Senator Coleman continues to vote against bringing our troops home.
Here’s where I stand:
I say it’s time to leave Iraq. Our troops have served magnificently, but even General Petraeus has stated that military action alone cannot fix Iraq.
It’s been clear for years that this war was a mistake, and that mistake after mistake has been made in the conduct of it. And in my books, on my radio show, and all over this country, I’ve been speaking out for years about this sad, tragic mess. Now it’s time for all of us to come to terms with the truth about the situation there.
- There is no reason to believe that the Maliki government is able, or even willing, to meet the political benchmarks necessary to make progress in Iraq: devising a fair plan to share oil revenues among ethnic groups, reversing the disastrous de-Baathification and putting Sunnis back to work, engaging and eliminating sectarian death squads, and starting a reconciliation process to defuse sectarian tensions.
- Conversely, there is every reason to believe that the Maliki government just wants us to stay there so that they can consolidate their power. Our troops should not be there to make that happen.
- The best way to convince the Iraqi government that we’re leaving is to actually start leaving. I support immediately beginning the process of bringing our troops home. Our withdrawal should not be precipitous, and we should have a national conversation about the best way to complete our disengagement – we should put more thought into how we get out than we did into how we got in. But we should start now.
- At the same time, we should be convening a regional conference including Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Turkey, and Egypt to come up with a long-term plan for Iraq and ensure that a regional conflict does not arise. Jordan and Syria have over a million Iraqi refugees. Nobody wants Iraq to devolve into utter chaos. It’s inconceivable that the Bush administration hasn’t roused itself to initiate regional diplomacy.
