Monday, October 24, 2011

Two Quotes On Our Iraq Withdrawal

One frustrated,one abysmally stupid.

First, the frustration, from General John Keane, who was key in persuading President Bush to implement the urge strategy:

“I think it’s an absolute disaster,” said Gen. Keane, who advised Gen. David H. Petraeus when he was top Iraq commander. “We won the war in Iraq, and we’re now losing the peace.”

“Forty-four hundred lives lost,” Gen. Keane said. “Tens of thousands of troops wounded. Over a couple hundred thousand Iraqis killed. We liberated 25 million people. There is only one Arab Muslim country that elects its own government, and that is Iraq.

“We should be staying there to strengthen that democracy, to let them get the kind of political gains they need to get and keep the Iranians away from strangling that country. That should be our objective, and we are walking away from that objective.”


Sorry, General Keane. It is a disaster, but that mistake was set in stone when the Bush Administration decided to rush Iraq into elections with the idea of massaging his fetish of 'Arab Democracy' and empowered Shi'ite politicians with close ties to Iran instead of putting an interim pro-US government in power. Once that happened, the rest was predictable and just a matter of time.

And now the stupidity, from the same article:

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Sunday warned Iran not to miscalculate the U.S. decision to withdraw its troops.

“No one, most particularly Iran, should miscalculate about our continuing commitment to and with the Iraqis going forward,” she said in an interview with CNN from Uzbekistan.

“In addition to a very significant diplomatic presence in Iraq which will carry much of the responsibility for dealing with an independent, sovereign, democratic Iraq, we have bases in neighboring countries, we have our ally in Turkey. We have a lot of presence in that region,” she added.


As if Iran hasn't simply laughed at such pronouncements before? As if Erdogan's Islamist Turkey didn't sabotage our invasion of Iraq in 2003 and hasn't been a conduit for Iran evading the so-called sanctions since then? As if 150 troops guarding an embassy is going to stave off Moqtada al-Sadr and his Iranian armed and trained Shi'ite militia from Lebanonizing Iraq? As if the Iraqis themselves aren't booting us out in response to pressure from Iran?

Unbelievable. And there are people that still want this clueless woman as president.

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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Keane and you could care less that the Iraqi majority has wanted us out for many years, first polls commencing I believe in 2004, though the religious demographics of the polled vote has wavered as the tide of war wavered, vis a vis Shias and Sunnis.

But I admire your brazen honesty that "we" should have installed a "pro-US" "interim" lol puppet.
"We'd" still be fighting,then,an insurgency many times the present ones size, but what's a few more billion US taxpayers dollars in time of Collapse, if oiligarch/Israeli interests are protected?

Actually Iran's victory ("the rest")"was predictable" as soon as Bush invaded and the subdued celebrations doubtless began in Tehran in 2003.

Rob said...

Actually, the Iranians began screaming about 'encirclement' and sh*tting themselves as soon as the invasion occurred. They were afraid they were next...but they relaxed once they saw whom Bush was putting in power in Iraq and the lack of our response to the mullahs arming and training Shi'ite Iranian proxies like al-Sadr's Mahdi Army.

What caused the insurgency was (a) Saddam took advantage of our turtle like build up to war to release criminals from jail, establish arms caches and gin up the Sunnis about how the Shi'tes were going to treat them they way the Shi'ites had been treated. (B)Bush's putting a Shi'ite government in, which fanned the flames (c) Our failure to deal decisively with countries like Syria, Saudi Arabia and Iran allowing al-Qaeda and other fighters and arms tocross their borders and (D) Not stopping the Iran backed Shi'ite militias from forming and arming after the Golden Mosque at Karbala was destroyed.

Guess what, Anonymous? If I had been calling th eshots, I would have established an independent Kurdistan and put bases there, since they were our only real allies. I would have spanked Iran HARD as I described here and made it very important for the countries allowing access to terrorists to play differently.

And yeah, I would have kept Iraq under a military occupation at least as long as we did Germany ( 7 years) and installed a multi-sectarian interim government under our control. And I would have had Iraq's oil pay for the reconstruction of the country, not the American taxpayers.

Your allusion to the Iraq invasion being for Israel's benefit somehow is on a par with the other things you've had to say, but we dealt with that particular stupidity in another thread,didn't we?

You really need to get out more,enjoy life a little.