harikari.com

Now that we have some numbers to go with the accusations of torture, people are really starting to take notice.  The numbers:

The C.I.A. officers used waterboarding at least 83 times in August 2002 against Abu Zubaydah, according to a 2005 Justice Department legal memorandum. Abu Zubaydah has been described as a Qaeda operative.

A former C.I.A. officer, John Kiriakou, told ABC News and other news media organizations in 2007 that Abu Zubaydah had undergone waterboarding for only 35 seconds before agreeing to tell everything he knew.

The 2005 memo also says that the C.I.A. used waterboarding 183 times in March 2003 against Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-described planner of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

So now that we have documents confirming Zubaydah was waterboarded an average of three times a day in August 2002 and Mohammed was waterboarded an average of six times a day in March 2003, people are finally starting to get outraged.

I was outraged after hearing we did it – ONCE.  Waterboarding is torture and torture is illegal.  Torturing prisoners does not send the right message to the rest of the world.  Nothing good can come from torturing people, and I don’t give a damn what Evil Dick Cheney says.  The Bush Administration admitted to waterboarding “a few times” a few years ago, and we should have begun investigations right then.  But Americans love numbers, and numbers are what get them excited about doing something, so maybe now we’ll get started.

I guess some people thought we did it only a few times and we supposedly gained valuable intelligence as a result of it, so we should just excuse the illegality of the act.  But now that we have numbers documenting the CIA’s repetitive use of waterboarding, we can no longer think of them as having had just a few lapses in moral behavior.  They waterboarded with such alarming frequency that we must now think of them as serial torturers.  183 times on one man in one month!  83 times on another man in one month!  266 documented instances of waterboarding on just two prisoners!

Speaking of prisoners, this is what George W. Bush said about how they should be treated back in March of 2003 shortly after the Iraqi military captured some of our soldiers:

“If there is somebody captured, I expect those people to be treated humanely. If not, the people who mistreat the prisoners will be treated as war criminals.”

And Donald Rumsfeld on March 25, 2003:

“This war is an act of self-defense, to be sure, but it is also an act of humanity…. In recent days, the world has witnessed further evidence of their [Iraqi] brutality and their disregard for the laws of war. Their treatment of coalition POWs is a violation of the Geneva Conventions.”

Waterboarding is inhumane, immoral, and illegal so, by Bush and Rumsfeld’s own standards for treatment of American prisoners of war, they and everyone in the Bush Administration that justified the use of torture should be treated as war criminals.

One of the key enablers was Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee who wrote in a memo how waterboarding would be carried out.  He was a lawyer and is now a judge.  He is not fit to sit on the bench.  Go here to call for his impeachment.

Just this weekend Obama and Rahm Emanuel said “It’s not a time to use our energy and our time in looking back” out of “any sense of anger and retribution.”

But now the numbers have had an affect on the Obama Administration and today MSNBC reports on President Obama’s “opening of the door” to prosecution.

President Barack Obama left the door open Tuesday to prosecuting Bush administration officials who devised the legal authority for gruesome terror-suspect interrogations, saying the United States lost “our moral bearings” with use of the tactics.

The question of whether to bring charges against those who devised justification for the methods “is going to be more of a decision for the attorney general within the parameters of various laws and I don’t want to prejudge that,” Obama said.

You can go to firedoglake to sign a petition requesting Attorney General Eric Holder to appoint a Special Prosecutor to begin investigations of the Bush Administration’s use of torture.

And when you are done, watch Keith Olbermann on Daily Kos and take part in the poll.

The Washington Post has confirmed that the United States has used torture at Guantanamo Bay. 

From the Reuters article:

The Pentagon official overseeing the tribunals for Guantanamo Bay detainees has concluded that the U.S. military tortured a Saudi national who allegedly planned to participate in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, The Washington Post reported on Wednesday.

“We tortured [Mohammed al-] Qahtani,” Susan Crawford said in an interview with the newspaper. “His treatment met the legal definition of torture. And that’s why I did not refer the case” for prosecution.

I can only hope that once Obama gets into office he will look into the activities and punish all who were involved, up to and including George W. Bush.

But, we will need to hold Obama accountable for investigating the former administration.  I am concerned about the possibility that he will attempt to downplay the crimes of the past administration.

From his recent TV interview, Think Progress reports:

Q: The most popular question on your own website is related to this. On change.gov it comes from Bob Fertik of New York City and he asks, ‘Will you appoint a special prosecutor ideally Patrick Fitzgerald to independently investigate the greatest crimes of the Bush administration, including torture and warrantless wiretapping.’

OBAMA:We’re still evaluating how we’re going to approach the whole issue of interrogations, detentions, and so forth. And obviously we’re going to be looking at past practices and I don’t believe that anybody is above the law. On the other hand, I also have a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards. … My orientation is going to be moving foward.

As a nation, we need to watch this closely over the next year and let our representatives in Congress know how we feel about the United States committing War Crimes.

First, honk if you like bumper sticker politics:

1. GWB tells Israel that Obama is going to cause the next holocaust.

2. Hard Ball host Chris Matthews challenges a loud-mouthed, flock-jock, talk(ing points) radio host and republican party line parrot to back up his words with a little substance. I swear to god I haven’t seen this kind of hard-line reporting technique since John Stossel in the `80s.

3. Former White House mouthpiece takes extreme pride in fucking doing his job:

4. Speaking of White House mouthpieces, this idiot just needs to die.

5. Walking in apparent lockstep momentum with the republican stupidity landslide (the kind that threatens to destroy structural foundations and is generally caused by poor urban planning and overcrowding of popular real estate), Mike Huckabee conflates government regulation of industry and government interference in our personal lives to pander to “self-government” activists. Also makes a joke about pro-gun morons assassinating liberal political hopefuls. Just let me say now, FUCK YOU YOU FUCKING FUCK PIECE OF SHIT ASSHOLE MORON. Also, I hate Mike Huckabee.

6. For which he later apologized. Even the republican party is beginning to understand the breadth, depth, and kinetic energy of its own stupidity.

If the democrats don’t win this time I’m just going to acquire a heroin habit. If this reality is so ludicrous, the alternate one has got to be better.

This edition of Frontline is incredible. It’s causing me to reconsider my opinion of Bush and his administration’s handling of the Iraq War. It’s not an unstoppable freight train of bad decision making, with Bush at the helm, it’s several unstoppable freight trains helmed by the megalomaniacal power brokers Bush unwittingly empowered. And they’re all racing for the Iraq War Central junction, at which Bush is the signalman.

It’s his weak leadership that has led to this train wreck. It seems there may have been good intentions on several fronts that I had never guessed were there. But the infighting, the egos, and the political positioning, among other forces, are directly at odds with the occasional demonstration of competence and thoughtful concern for the consequences of their pursuits.

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Following a week of testimony from General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker, Bush appeared on TV last night and said:

In their testimony, these men made clear that our challenge in Iraq is formidable. Yet they concluded that conditions in Iraq are improving, that we are seizing the initiative from the enemy, and that the troop surge is working.

Followed by blah, blah, blah and a lot of misleading statistics about how the level of violence is down in Anbar, Baghdad, and Diyala.  Our mendacious leader failed to mention that the sectarian killings are down because the targets of their violence have fled the neighborhoods. 

The Uniter moved on to:

Whatever political party you belong to, whatever your position on Iraq, we should be able to agree that America has a vital interest in preventing chaos and providing hope in the Middle East. We should be able to agree that we must defeat al Qaeda, counter Iran, help the Afghan government, work for peace in the Holy Land, and strengthen our military so we can prevail in the struggle against terrorists and extremists.

Again, he failed to acknowledge that there was no al Qaeda presence in Iraq before we invaded.  If his goal really had been to “strengthen our military so we can prevail in the struggle against terrorists and extremists,” he would have continued fighting the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan and followed them into Pakistan where they are now—stronger than ever. 

But alas… there’s no oil in Afghanistan, and therein lies the real story.

Paul Krugman tells the tale quite well in today’s column:

To understand what’s really happening in Iraq, follow the oil money, which already knows that the surge has failed.

Back in January, announcing his plan to send more troops to Iraq, President Bush declared that “America will hold the Iraqi government to the benchmarks it has announced.”

Near the top of his list was the promise that “to give every Iraqi citizen a stake in the country’s economy, Iraq will pass legislation to share oil revenues among all Iraqis.”

There was a reason he placed such importance on oil: oil is pretty much the only thing Iraq has going for it. Two-thirds of Iraq’s G.D.P. and almost all its government revenue come from the oil sector. Without an agreed system for sharing oil revenues, there is no Iraq, just a collection of armed gangs fighting for control of resources.

…

What’s particularly revealing is the cause of the breakdown. Last month the provincial government in Kurdistan, defying the central government, passed its own oil law; last week a Kurdish Web site announced that the provincial government had signed a production-sharing deal with the Hunt Oil Company of Dallas, and that seems to have been the last straw.

Now here’s the thing: Ray L. Hunt, the chief executive and president of Hunt Oil, is a close political ally of Mr. Bush. More than that, Mr. Hunt is a member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, a key oversight body.

…

No, what’s interesting about this deal is the fact that Mr. Hunt, thanks to his policy position, is presumably as well-informed about the actual state of affairs in Iraq as anyone in the business world can be. By putting his money into a deal with the Kurds, despite Baghdad’s disapproval, he’s essentially betting that the Iraqi government — which hasn’t met a single one of the major benchmarks Mr. Bush laid out in January — won’t get its act together. Indeed, he’s effectively betting against the survival of Iraq as a nation in any meaningful sense of the term.

The smart money, then, knows that the surge has failed, that the war is lost, and that Iraq is going the way of Yugoslavia. And I suspect that most people in the Bush administration — maybe even Mr. Bush himself — know this, too.

Last night Bush made it clear that he has every intention of passing this war on to the next president.  That reminds me of a football metaphor that Petraeus used not long ago.  He said “[We are] a long way from the goal line but we do have the ball and we are driving down the field.” (Check out Pierre Tristam’s column about what the use of a football metaphor in a soccer country says about the problem with our game plan.)

So to use another football analogy, we may have the ball, but the drive has stalled and we’re facing third and 36 on our own 22 yard line.  The next play:  Bush drops back to pass, the ball slips out of his hands and all he can do is hope that someone on his team picks up the ball so his team can punt.

I have been thinking about yesterday’s article in the New York Times about the company responsible for the current demolition project at the Deutsche Bank building in NYC.

First, a little background on the Deutsche Bank building. This building was originally damaged during the events of 9/11/2001 and is currently being deconstructed/demolished. Just a couple of days ago, the Deutsche Bank building was responsible for the deaths of two firefighters who were killed while attempting to put out a fire in the building. While the deaths of these heroes is tragic, this is not my point.
The lead paragraph of yesterday’s NYT story is enough to get the conspiracists going:

The John Galt Corporation of the Bronx, hired last year for the dangerous and complex job of demolishing the former Deutsche Bank building at 130 Liberty Street, where two firefighters died last Saturday, has apparently never done any work like it. Indeed, Galt does not seem to have done much of anything since it was incorporated in 1983.

“So what” you say? Ever read Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged? Who is John Galt?
I have already said too much…

Today’s story from the Associated Press sounds oddly familiar…

The terrorist network Al-Qaida will likely leverage its contacts and capabilities in Iraq to mount an attack on U.S. soil, according to a new National Intelligence Estimate on threats to the United States.

I guess there’s a chance that Bush might even read this NEA report.  In it he’ll find that:

The report lays out a range of dangers — from al-Qaida to Lebanese Hezbollah to non-Muslim radical groups — that pose a “persistent and evolving threat” to the country over the next three years. As expected, however, the findings focus most of their attention on the gravest terror problem: Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida network.

…

The new report echoed statements made by senior intelligence officials over the last year, including the assessment of spy agencies that the country is in a “heightened threat environment.” It also provided new details on their thinking and concerns.
 
For instance, the report says that worldwide counterterrorism efforts since 2001 have constrained al-Qaida’s ability to attack the U.S. again and convinced terror groups that U.S. soil is a tougher target.

But, the report quickly adds, analysts are concerned “that this level of international cooperation may wane as 9/11 becomes a more distant memory and perceptions of the threat diverge.”

So the message here is the same as it ever was:

I was listening to NPR’s ‘Morning Edition’ recently when they played an excerpt from the most recent debate of GOP presidential hopefuls.  Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani was saying that he could not imagine pursuing the war on terror and leaving Saddam Hussein in power in Iraq.  It struck me that Mr Giuliani doesn’t have much of an imagination.

Despite the Bush administration’s propaganda, notably Dick Cheney’s flights into the fantasy of a Saddam-Osama bin-Ladin connection, we know now with virtual certainty that Saddam’s secular Iraq had no operational relationship with Osama and al-Qaida; indeed, a relationship of any sort would defy logic.  The Islamic extremists hated Saddam almost as much as they despise the United States. Saddam in turn had ruthlessly hunted down Islamic fundamentalists in his own country as he did anyone who could pose even the most tenuous of threats to his rule.  And it would make no sense for Saddam to give the US a pretext for his overthrow by helping al-Qaida with training, weapons and money.  In short, Saddam had little to gain and everything to lose by co-operating with al-Qaida. 

The reality in post-Saddam Iraq is quite different.  After blowing the lid off in Iraq we released not freedom but chaos. In that environment an al-Qaida affiliate has established and flourished; the war itself has served as a rallying cry and recruiting tool both for the larger al-Qaida organization (safely and securely ensconced in the Afghanistan-Pakistan Pashtun border region) and its affiliate in Iraq; it has served as a very effective training ground for Islamic terrorists to utilize their battlefield skills and tactical acumen for use elsewhere in the Middle East; it has even stimulated weapons research and development for guerrillas fighting conventional mobile armoured forces such as in the use of increasingly effective improvised explosive devices; and it has bogged down the major part of our ground forces in a front on the war on Islamic terrorists that didn’t exist before our invasion.  Meanwhile a rejuvenated Taliban challenges us once again in Afghanistan, albeit here at least we have the support of our NATO allies.    

The brutal and unvarnished truth is that however much of a tyrant he was, Saddam Hussein was, ironically, a bulwark against Islamic extremism and al-Qaida in the Middle East.  One can make the argument that it was the moral thing to do to remove such a cruel and inhumane ruler regardless of the consequences; but no reasonable, thinking person (and this would exclude both Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, stuck in their 1970’s-era time warped obsession with state-sponsored terrorism) can argue that invading Iraq and toppling Saddam Hussein struck a blow against al-Qaida or Islamic terrorism in general.  And if Giuliani and the rest of the singularly unimpressive GOP presidential field really believe differently (as all but one of them apparently do), they’re no more fit to lead this nation than George W Bush. 

One thing this nation does not need is to replace one clueless president with another.

The United States and NATO campaign in Afghanistan to support the democratic government of Afghanistan and to defeat the al-Qaida/Taliban alliance has always represented something of a balancing act.  The challenge is to accomplish these critical and difficult tasks without alienating a population that has always been suspicious of and resistant to anything they perceive as foreign occupation.  For that reason the US and NATO has strived to maintain a modest military footprint.  The downside is that it may be too small in relation to the mission. 

The problem may be aggravated by the fact that the war in Iraq has placed such a strain on the US ground forces that there simply aren’t enough available to significantly buttress the force in Afghanistan, especially of Special Forces soldiers, who function best in that environment.

In Afghanistan the US has relied on air strikes both as a tactical tool and as a substitute for a more substantive ground presence.  The benefits are obvious: such strikes enable the US/NATO forces to fight off ambushes by superior numbers of Taliban; they enable quick strikes against Taliban forces where ground forces are unavailable; and they increase the firepower of the US/NATO forces enormously in a difficult environment where they do not always enjoy a numerical or tactical advantage. 

Increasingly, however, the use of airpower by US and NATO forces has exacted a price in terms of civilian casualties that the people of Afghanistan may not be prepared to pay much longer.  And if their anger at what they perceive as an indifference to civilian deaths reaches a tipping point, the US/NATO effort not to mention the authority of the government of Hamid Kaizai could well begin to unravel. 

It seems that hardly a week goes by without a fresh report of innocent women and children being killed and injured in air strikes aimed at insurgents. It is hardly a comfort to the relatives of the deceased that the insurgents may have taken refuge in houses or compounds containing civilians from which they had fired at US or NATO forces.

It seems reasonable to ask whether this apparent over reliance on airpower which, even with the precision technology now available, still represents a blunt instrument, is entirely appropriate in a counter-insurgency war where winning the hearts and minds of the people is paramount. 

Even a casual reader of military history will know that over reliance on airpower has been a criticism that has dogged the American military since World War II.  German accounts and assessments of American combat prowess were invariably contemptuous of what they saw as a dependence on air support (which might easily have been mistaken for envy) in the face of the enemy.  The same criticism has followed the American army in Korea and Vietnam.  In these wars, however, most of the fighting was done on the open battlefield; even in Vietnam, the fighting was primarily against main-force Vietcong and later North Vietnamese regulars, against whom the employment of airpower made perfect sense.

Afghanistan and Iraq, however, are different and the continuation of the trend to use airpower as additional firepower in urban or suburban centres, or in villages and towns where civilians live in significant numbers is disturbing and counterproductive.

And it is not just airpower that has been a problem; civilians have also been targeted by ground forces, notably in a recent incident when a US Marine Corps Special Operations company appears, by most accounts, to have gone postal after a roadside bomb exploded close to their convoy. 

US commanders seem aware of the problem but have yet come up with any solutions.

You don’t have to be a military expert to know that counterinsurgency warfare requires both a different mind and skill set than a conventional conflict.  Even aside from the moral aspect, avoiding “collateral damage” i.e. civilian casualties is not merely important – it is critical to the success of the mission.  Without the support of the populations, success in either Iraq and or Afghanistan will be impossible.

It is no secret that America’s British allies have been appalled at times by the heavy handed, overly aggressive approach of the American forces in Iraq, particularly at the beginning of the occupation, which may have contributed to the insurgency taking root in Sunni Anbar Province and elsewhere.  There are signs that the message has got through in the Iraq theatre, particularly with new and better leaders such as General David Petraeus.  However, the  meltdown by the Marine Special Operations unit in Afghanistan suggests that the problems still persist there, even in supposedly elite units?

It seems reasonable at this juncture to pose some pertinent questions such as:

-                     Is the US military really suited by temperament and training to counterinsurgency type warfare or is it simply trained to be too aggressive, an attribute which may work well on a conventional battlefield, but is a liability in a counterinsurgency environment?

-                     Are our forces stretched so thin because of the Iraq imbroglio that we can’t put enough of the right sort or mix of units, such as more special forces, where they are needed in Afghanistan?  

-                     Is it enough to pursue a counterinsurgent strategy without the necessary change to the military culture to enable such a plan to succeed in Afghanistan and Iraq?

Nobody doubts the bravery or dedication of the American forces or their ability to wage conventional warfare.  Waging a counterinsurgency, however, requires more than a re-write of the appropriate army manual.  Whether our soldiers are now embroiled in conflicts for which their temperament, culture and training has simply not prepared them – that is where there is room for doubt. 

Opponents of setting a deadline for the withdrawal of major United States and Coalition combat forces from Iraq typically use some or all of the following arguments :

-         setting a deadline tells our enemies how long they need to hang on for victory – or, as neo-conservative William Kristol declares in an outraged tone every Sunday on ‘Fox News Sunday’ during the panel discussion: America’s “surrender day”;

-         we will have handed al-Qaida, who consider Iraq the major front in the war on America, total victory;

-         the al-Qaida terrorists will “follow” us home and we’ll be fighting them on our own streets instead of in Baghdad;

-         if we think the chaos and slaughter in Iraq is bad now, wait until we withdraw;

-         the meltdown in Iraq that’s sure to follow the withdrawal of US forces will engulf the Middle East in regional strife that we will be powerless to contain;

-         the US will lose its credibility and the world will no longer believe we have the stomach for war (that’s one of Vice-President Cheney’s favourites – he of the “other priorities” when he had an opportunity to serve during the Vietnam War);

-         the sacrifice of the troops who have fought and died or been seriously wounded will have been in vain;

-         we have a responsibility as the nation that invaded and occupied Iraq to see the mission through and leave Iraq, if not a shining beacon of democracy in the Mid-East, at least stable and functioning as a state.

To these points in turn I would respond thus:

-         setting a deadline above all else tells the world that we have no territorial designs on Iraq or on its resources, that there is a limit to our willingness to have our soldiers fight and die waiting for Iraq’s politicians to make the hard decisions that will make the country governable and able to function as a state, and that only Iraqis can solve their differences and come together as a nation; I would argue also that a phased, unhurried and orderly withdrawal from a country where we do not belong, that we should never have invaded in the first place, and which we have insisted all along we would not occupy indefinitely, is only “surrender” in the minds of ideologically blinded, muddleheaded political flacks such as Bill Kristol – oh, and the president and vice-president;

-         our invasion of Muslim Iraq with our largely Christian armed forces has furthered al-Qaida’s  aims and objectives in a way that few other actions by the US could have matched – so much so, that Osama bin Laden (OBL) must have thought his birthday had come early; it has bogged down and worn out the ground force component of our armed forces, divided us from traditional allies, inflamed anti-American  passions among Muslims throughout the Middle-East and stimulated recruitment for al-Qaida and affiliated terrorist groups;  the last thing al-Qaida wants us to do is leave Iraq, thus they try to goad us into staying by pretending that they will have driven us out – a line that resonates with Bush/Cheney and the GOP base;

-         the “follow us home” line which we hear so often from right-wing pundits, Bush, Cheney and even some, like Senator Joe Lieberman who I used to think had a brain, is hardly worthy of response given its absurdity;  they never actually explain how that would happen (would they charter a plane or six, maybe? hijack a ship and wade ashore on Myrtle Beach, perhaps? persuade some hapless State Department consular officer somewhere to issue non-immigrant visas to them en masse?) or show any recognition that al-Qaida-in-Iraq is a franchise of the main OBL-led organization, is rooted in Iraq itself and will have its hands full fighting for survival after we leave in a country which is 80% Shiite and Kurdish and where even the Sunni minority doesn’t buy into al-Qaida’s evil brand of extremist, fundamentalist Islamic fascism; 

-         the violence in Iraq may, indeed, get worse before it gets better once we depart Iraq, but that may happen anyway whether we leave in a year or five years; in any event, I go back to the argument that it must be for Iraqis to decide their future and that the presence of American military occupiers is as much a catalyst for violence as a positive force to quell it;

-         as for the possibility that the chaos will engulf the Middle-East, all the more reason for us to plan now for such a scenario by engaging our allies in the region as well as in Europe and reaching out diplomatically to Iran and Syria, neither of whom have any national interest in a regional conflict, to contain and limit the conflagration if it occurs;

-         the old canard about the world believing we don’t have the stomach for sustaining a war if we quit Iraq is a  figment of Cheney’s fevered imagination; we will be engaged in Afghanistan for many years to come (if the people there don’t rise up against us for killing so many civilians in air strikes or in undisciplined panic attacks by our troops) if anyone wants proof of our staying power; as for our credibility, we will have regained much in the eyes of the world if we withdraw from Iraq since almost nobody thought it made sense to go there in the first place;

-         I happen to hold the belief that the sacrifices of the members of our armed forces whenever and wherever it has been made, have never been in vain or wasted when we, as a nation, set them a mission that we thought was in the national interest; sometimes our country has been wrong or misguided, but the faithful and dedicated service of our servicemen and women will never be forgotten and will never have been wasted.

Finally, if we break it, it’ll be ours to fix – to paraphrase then Secretary of State Colin Powell’s pre-invasion warning to Bush.  This is by far the most compelling reason to stay in Iraq until some sort of stability and order can be imposed.  After all, our actions precipitated the chaos that followed the overthrow of the established order, introduced terrorist groups into the country, the car bombings, the sectarian murder and mayhem. How can we just up and leave?  Even I, a certified member of the 30% Club who bitterly opposed the madness of an Iraq invasion from the beginning, have a problem with that one.  Isn’t it our responsibility to see this thing through even if it takes five or ten years for the sakes of the people of Iraq?

I can only reiterate my belief that it is in the long term interests of Iraq and its people that we leave as soon as possible.  Al-Qaida has stoked the violence in Iraq but once they are deprived of the unifying element of a foreign occupier, I believe the people – Sunnis as well as Shiite and Kurds – will turn on them and destroy them.  Only if the Shiite politicians in Baghdad myopically fail to share power and the nation’s oil wealth with the Sunni minority will the latter be tempted into an unholy alliance with al-Qaida.

The US and its coalition of the lukewarm-willing have overthrown a tyrant and afforded the Iraqis an opportunity for a new beginning.  Major US ground forces should stay no more than another year. Beyond that, we should leave dedicated anti-terrorist forces, trainers and air/naval assets to assist the Iraqi armed forces and provide whatever other economic, diplomatic and other help we can to a friendly government. It is past time, however, for Iraqis themselves to determine Iraq’s future without the security blanket of the US Army and Marine Corps.