The New Road

Blood is in the water

Clearly blood is in the water over Iraq and the reasons that we went to war. None of this is new, but it's nice to finally hear it in the mainstream.

Clinton has come in from the sidelines:

"Saddam is gone. It's a good thing, but I don't agree with what was done," Clinton told students at a forum at the American University of Dubai.

"It was a big mistake. The American government made several errors ... one of which is how easy it would be to get rid of Saddam and how hard it would be to unite the country."

Better late than never. With Carter having said much the same thing recently that leaves two out the three remaining ex-presidents now strongly against the war. Of course Bush Sr. would never come out and say as much but his autobiography basically laid out the current quagmire years before we went to war, and Bush himself has been oddly silent on all of this.

Yeah, there is definitely blood in the water here. Both sides are very frustrated about the war. On the right the folks want the army to fire up the nukes and start levelling whole cities to subdue the insurgency and the populace. On the left we just want a pullout, given our previous experience with Vietnam. Neither of these options is going to happen which leaves us all in a lurch with no plan.

Clearly we aren't going to just walk away, and clearly we aren't going to go nuclear. So what do we do? Turns out even the Republican Congress doesn't know. So they took the tiny bit of Democratic legislation on the table, which required reporting and a timeline. Then pulled the timeline language and put it up as the Republican solution to the problem. Can Republicans really call the Democrats shrill and complain they have no plan when the plan they just passed was started by the Democrats?

Personally I think a timeline is the best way to go. A timeline would, instead of fueling the insurgency, put a clear end point on the invasion and ensure that all sides in Iraq take steps to become politically active so that they can be involved in the process after we leave. Either that, or there will be civil war, and frankly, that's always been on the table and there is nothing that we can do to take it off.

The worst thing that could happen at this point is for a lame duck president to just limp out of office three years from now with the troops still fighting for their lives against an ever growing insurgency in Iraq. We need a real plan, executed by a real leader. Not some incoherent madman bumbling around talking about an inconceivable impossible "total victory".

(I'm going to my run-on sentence anonymous class later this month. ;-) )