Thu Feb 09 2012

Exit stage Baghdad
by Cynthia L. Butler, Esq.
February 7, 2005

Was it Colonel Klink or Captain Schultz who said "I know NUTHINK!"?

Neither. On Sunday’s Meet the Press, when asked if there were a goal or timetable for an exit strategy for Iraq, Donald Rumsfeld hid under the shadows of the "unknowable" and said that there are just some things we can't know. Well, Ted Kennedy disagrees. You know what you plan and intend to execute. You can have a reasoned best estimate of the likelihood of people getting on planes that you deploy to leave. Ted Kennedy understands that if your goal is to truly leave the Iraqi government and self defense to the Iraqis then you plan an exit strategy and you execute it with all due diligence. You train adequate numbers of troops, and you leave them at it.

This might be a bit too much "tough love" in approach for Rumsfeld, but it has to happen. No one is fooled when he says that he can't know when it will happen.

Iraqis are well past the bike-riding-toddler-metaphors Rumsfeld is fond of wherein he likens himself to the Dad holding the handlebars of democracy. They had an election; they will pick their leader or create civil war on their own. Like the parent who refuses to stop calling the kid they dropped off at college, Rumsfeld leaves a completely open timetable, stating to do otherwise would "tie the hands of the President." Will someone please "tie the hands of the President"?!! Idle hands make for foul play, and clearly he needs a better hobby.

Ted Kennedy is spot-on correct when he notes that they are just making it up as they go along.

No, Mom, you cannot be the Dorm Mother and stay here until he graduates then move in with him after he is married also. Go back home. Call once in a while to check up on him, but not five times a day. The Iraqis can make their own bed now and lie in it.

Ted Kennedy makes another, perhaps the most critically important, point in noting that Congress did not vote to go to War to Democratize Iraq, they went to war for two reasons that were later learned to be completely pretextual and fraudulent; e.g. the WMD hysteria and the operational link to Al Quaida, the ball off of which the Administrative eye was taken. We have witnessed democracies rise in Chile (after Pinochet's fall) in South Africa and numerous other places around the world without shedding one drop of American blood. We know democracy and freedom can be on the march without instigating war without provoked attack and mass slaughter of over 100,000 innocent civilians and killing off a number of troops equal to half the number killed in 9-11. We don't need to go to War to bring Democracy. Neither did Jesus anywhere approve of or authorize anyone using violence to spread his Word. I am reminded of the refrigerator magnet that says "Jesus called. He wants his religion back."

So whether this war will prove to be a colossal "whoooops" or a "holy mother of God!" karmic recipe for untold catastrophe our allies and us in the near future, one thing is clear- you don't solve a mistake by burying yourself in deeper. You cauterize the wounds and you leave them to the open air to oxygenate. You don't keep picked scabs and expect them to heal. We need to leave Iraq.

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