In Iraq, Without Options

[RedEarth]

The quagmire this administration has gotten our country into is totally beyond comprehension. What were these fools thinking of......

By Harold Meyerson

Wednesday, April 7, 2004; Page A31


So now the president's war of choice has led to an occupation with no good options.

The Bush administration's plan is to hand over control of Iraq to the Iraqi Governing Council on June 30. Just how that council will sustain itself in power, however, is increasingly unclear after the upheaval of the past few days. Its own police force, which the United States has spent time and treasure recruiting and training, all but collapsed during the uprising of Moqtada Sadr's Shiite militia.

In Kufa, Najaf and Baghdad's own Sadr City, the government's new cops handed over police cars and police stations to the militia without any reported resistance. In some instances, the cops actually joined forces with Sadr's militants.

So much for our thin blue line.

Within Iraq, there are thousands of current and potential gunmen willing to fight for their people and their creeds -- Kurdish automony, Sunni hegemony, Shiite control, an Islamic republic. But the force charged with defending a pluralistic, united Iraq just went AWOL under fire.

It's not that there aren't lots of Iraqis committed to a democratic, relatively nonsectarian nation. But that is just one faith among many in post-Hussein Iraq. And by keeping sole control of the occupation, the White House has ensured that the cause of pluralistic nationhood has become disastrously intermingled with support for the U.S. occupation.



http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A56304-2004Apr6?language=printer

[Beetwasher]

1. YOW!

"The only unequivocally good policy option before the American people is to dump the president who got us into this mess, who had no trouble sending our young people to Iraq but who cannot steel himself to face the Sept. 11 commission alone."

[MrBenchley]

3. Great piece...

He not only cannot "steel himself to face the Sept. 11 commission alone," he went on vacation!!!

[priller]

2. This is stunning, coming from the WaPo.

An editor for the WaPo has come out for dumping Bush? Wow, I'm amazed!

[MrBenchley]

4. Great public statement by Kerry:

"Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry criticized the administration Wednesday for deciding at a relative early juncture to set the June 30 target date for transferring sovereignty back to the Iraqis and said Bush has yet to explain to whom power in Iraq would be delivered.
"You don't set an arbitrary date for the transfer of power to a non entity. You have to make the judgment of stability. I mean, this date it, appears to me, may well have been set by the American election, not by the stability of Iraq," Kerry said in an interview with American Urban Radio.
"Where are the people with the flowers, throwing them in the streets, welcoming the American liberators the way Dick Cheney said they would be?" Kerry said. "This is one of the greatest failures of diplomacy and failures of judgment that I have seen in all the time that I've been in public life." "

http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/world/ny-bushiraq0407,0,5076484.story?coll=ny-homepage-big-pix