Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki states that the U.S. troops are no longer needed in Iraq. Iraqi forces can provide the security Iraq needs. This is his response to the interim report on Iraq just given by the Bush administration.
Of the 16 Washington-established benchmarks in that report, the Bush administration stated that Iraq was failing 8 items entirely and "making progress" on 8 others. Maliki's point appears to be that those benchmarks are a fiction created in Washington, D.C. and have no relevance in Iraq. Considering the clear nearly total ignorance of the Iraqi nation that the Bush administration displays, this is not a bit surprising.
Polls have shown that the majority of the public in both the United States and the public in Iraq want the American troops out of Iraq quickly. The stumbling block is the ignorant stubbornness of Cheney and Bush and the presumed desire of the government of Iraq to keep the Americans there. Now Maliki puts the government of Iraq on the side of those saying get the American troops out.
The only stumbling block now to getting American troops out of Iraq now is to convince Bush that there is nothing further that they can do there. Unfortunately, in bush's simplistic "It's either Black or White." mind, we "lose the War in Iraq" when we decide to leave, and "We have not lost Iraq as long as we are still there."
So what Bush has done is set the decision about what we are going to do with our troops in Iraq as a referendum on "What we have already done with our troops in Iraq." So it doesn't matter that the American military is losing about 100 soldiers to death per month, another 800 to a 1000 to severe, crippling and permanent wounds, and some 40% of all combat soldiers are coming home with severe mental illnesses. They will stay there an fight (according to Bush) until somehow the purposeless invasion of Iraq can be justified.
That is an extremely high price to pay to justify an invasion that every expert outside the Bush administration and the Republican Party recognizes cannot be achieved. The only people now who refuse to recognize that the invasion of Iraq is a totally failed enterprise are those whose jobs depend on not recognizing that fact even as their noses are rubbed in it. Now Prime Minister Maliki has just rubbed their noses in it - Big Time.
There is no further rational reason for American troops to fight and die in Iraq, not when the only goal for their fighting is to return stability to that nation and their very presence is the major destabilizing factor.
A good poker player will tell you not to throw good money into a pot that is already lost.
An effective businessperson will tell you that when a project has failed, you do not use "sunk costs" to justify not canceling it.
A good General will adamantly state that you do not reinforce a failed position.
Yet Bush, Cheney and the Republican Party are saying that we can't leave the failed enterprise in Iraq because of the blood and treasure we have already spend there, and leaving acknowledges failure. Somehow if we don't admit failure, we haven't failed.
The facts show how false, how very hollow that argument is. There is no significant measurement by which the American unilateral invasion of Iraq can be considered to be anything but an utter failure. For the Bush administration to continue to send American troops into the meat grinder does not change the fact that the Iraq expedition is a total failure. Delaying the date of withdrawal does not and will not change that failure into anything else, and history will recognize that Iraq was not and is not America's War. It is a war fought by Bush and Cheney for the benefit of the Republican Party and its hold on power in the U.S. government, nothing else. Just as no serious historian today accepts the position of the Nixon Presidential Library that Watergate was a Coup against Nixon, no legitimate serious historian is going to later define the Bush administration and its highlight event, the unnecessary and distracting war in Iraq as anything but the single most massive failure of American foreign policy to occur since American became a nation.
Maliki has offered an escape hatch. He says that the Americans have don't their job and are no longer needed. It is time we took him up on it and get out, and if Bush and Cheney have their egos too thoroughly involved to accept that their militaristic fantasies cannot be achieved, then we need to remove them and replace them with leaders who serve the American nation, not their own over-stuffed and corrupt egos.
Someone needs to look to America's needs for the future and quit wasting troops, time and money trying to justify a failed past. If Bush and Cheney have to go to get someone to do what America needs done, then so be it.
From Atrios:
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