Reply #5: Some talking points anent a strategy for Iraq

[gratuitous]

First of all, nobody seems to really know what's going on right now in Iraq. The administration assures us day after day that progress is being made. Yet, reports come out all the time of another attack, another city taken over by insurgents, another aid group leaving because the American wehrmacht can't protect them.

As such, making peremptory statements about what kind of strategy to pursue are just so much hot air. With all the inside knowledge that the Bush administration has, they still aren't capable of stopping the deterioration of the situation in Iraq.

That being said, the road to normalization for Iraq will begin with the U.S. getting its big bazoo out of Iraq's affairs. Mr. Bush's best friend before and for the first year of the invasion was Ahmad Chalabi. It seems now that Mr. Chalabi is an Iranian double-agent, and a corrupt money-launderer. Why these facts haven't gotten more play in the U.S. media is an unanswerable question. The implications are just too hideous to contemplate.

Finally, the Bush doctrine of going-it-alone (and the administration can just stow its empty rhetoric of the coalition of the willing) has isolated the U.S. when we most need our allies and friends to cooperate with us in tracking terrorists. Terrorists move at will through countries that are our putative allies (Pakistan), and their money flies around the world, working mischief everywhere because this administration is too beholden to its monied interests to insist on a system of regulating banking transactions.

That'll do to start.