Barack Obama has an op ed in today’s New York Times called “My Plan for Iraq.” Juan Cole finds it mostly “thoughtful and sensible,” although he does have some disagreements. Wingnuts, of course, can’t understand why anyone would want to withdraw from Iraq. The war has been such a smashing success, after all.
The Mahablog
Politics. Society. Group Therapy.
The weird thing about wingnut hysteria is that the argument that we are winning is an argument FOR withdrawing sooner. There is no reason to stay if we have “won”, after all. Wasn’t it the Bbushies who said that we would stand down as the Iraqis stood up?
Eisenhower quote, “When people talk about preventive war, tell them to go fight it.”
Perhaps it’s time that the gung-ho for the ‘preventive’ war in Iraq replace those whom they’ve sent over to fight it. They can stay as long as they want. Of course they must pay their own way.
I think Obama is boxed in with Bush’s framing when he talks about leaving a residual force in Iraq to combat the Mesopotamian chapter of al-Qaida. Doesn’t Obama get it that al-Qaida is just a name applied to an abstraction to describe resistence to America’s will, and that an abstraction can never be defeated…sorta like Satan. Al-Qaida is like having a mold problem caused by moisture that you attack constantly with a spray bottle of bleach only to have it return because it hasn’t been deprived of its nutrients, the moisture and temperature. American forces in Iraq are the nutrients which feed al Qaida in Iraq. We’re gone..they’re gone..simple as that!