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When Will We Finally Pull The Plug On Mess In Iraq?
Imagine a bathtub half-full with stagnant water and the drain plugged. Your task: Empty the tub without a pail.
Do you: (a) stand there and hope the stagnating water evaporates, (b) turn the spigot on to fill the tub even higher, or (c) pull the plug?
If my admittedly imperfect analogy is not already apparent, the tub is the situation in Iraq and pulling the plug is the obvious answer.
In March 2003, the Bush administration opened the spigot and let the tub start filling. For four long years, it persisted with the same, flawed strategy - one hallmarked by insufficient forces and allies, and no exit plan.
Sure, the administration moved troop levels up and down a bit, altered tactics here and there, and replaced old generals with new. But, drip by drip, we mostly stood by idly as the water level continued to rise.
Then in January, President Bush and some enabling congressional Democrats decided that, rather than heed the voters' call last November to start draining the tub, we should open the spigot further. Call it a "surge" or a "troop increase," but by any name it was an escalation of the war.
Not surprisingly, the water level is rising faster. In the first 47 months of the war, an average of 2.18 American servicemen and women were killed daily. In the four months starting Feb. 1, the rate jumped to 3.28 - an extra dead soldier or Marine per day.
On the last day of May - which ended the deadliest six-month period of the entire war, with a total of 586 American fatalities - retired Army Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey warned a National Public Radio audience that things could get worse. "The bottom line: It's hard not to imagine the next 90 days not being a period of the most intense struggle seen yet in Iraq," he said.
Those are just the past, present and future American losses. The escalation has also failed to make the locals safer.
"The evidence does not suggest that the surge is actually working, if reduction in casualties is a criterion," Alastair Campbell, the former defense attaché at the British Embassy in Iraq, confessed upon leaving his post a few weeks ago. "The figures in April were not encouraging."
Since the start of the war, tens of thousands of Iraqis have died, with one study putting the figure at more than 650,000, and countless others have been blinded, disfigured, lost limbs or been irrevocably wounded in some way. An estimated 4 million Iraqis are refugees in their own country or in neighboring Syria and Jordan.
To put that into perspective, consider that Iraq's population is about one-eleventh the size of America's. Equivalent totals for the United States would be 7 million dead, millions permanently wounded, and 44 million displaced from their homes or disconnected from their families.
If that were the situation here, would we call it anything other than a humanitarian crisis?
Testifying last week during his Senate Armed Services Committee confirmation hearings as President Bush's new "war czar," Army Lt. Gen. Douglas E. Lute, expressed serious reservations about the escalation's effectiveness so far.
"I'd assess at this point that the Iraqi participation in the surge has been uneven so far," said General Lute. He said he warned the administration in January that escalation "would likely have only temporary and localized effects" unless the Iraqi government and the other, nonmilitary U.S. agencies joined the effort.
But are we really surprised that Iraqis aren't doing much to help us bail out the tub? They didn't fill it, and they didn't open the spigot further last January.
A dwindling number of dead-ender war advocates warn that leaving now will lead to sectarian bloodshed and a large-scale humanitarian crisis in Iraq. That may be true, but our continued presence only delays that inevitability and may well worsen it.
Of course, these same war apologists rarely fret about the existing humanitarian crisis in Iraq - the one created by their deceit-filled rush to war and subsequent military mismanagement.
It's time to pull the plug on this war, the neoconservatives who wrought it, and the president who bought and then sold it to the American public. Waiting and escalating only lets the tub level rise.
Thomas F. Schaller's column appears Wednesdays in The Sun. His e-mail is schaller67@hotmail.com.
© 2007 The Baltimore Sun
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15 Comments so far
Show AllWe won't be able to pull the plug on the Iraq war as long as Bush and Cheney are in office. They'll never learn. They'll never change. They'll never even come clean about why we're there.
We have to get over that. The constitution provides one and only one remedy: Impeachment.
Urge your Congressional reps to co-sponsor H.R. 333 today (Articles of Impeachment for Dick Cheney). I don't plan to donate to the campaigns of any Congresspeople who don't co-sponsor H.R. 333.
When corporate America colonizes a nation like Iraq, they don't even consider pulling the plug. It's a win win situation for them in terms of money, which is their primary objective. They control the oil, the puppet politicians, and get to milk hundreds of billions for it from the American taxpayers. They point at the violent resistance and use that to frighten Americans, and to persuade them to support a huge military budget, ten times larger than any other on earth.
They also do what they can to get Iraqis to kill each other - to stoke the fires of civil war.
But if those in charge of pulling the plug fail to do it, then we must ask the real question: why not? Why are they not emptying the tub when they can plainly see the water is stinky and stagnant and spreading disease? "Pull the plug already" we yell, and they respond: not yet.
The question we need a real answer to is: why not?
Draining the illegal fetid sump that is the Bush wars is indeed the right-on analogy.
Duh! Brilliant insights-not! Tell us something we don't already know! Like HOW! Your obvious insights are no more enlightning then saying SUPPORT OUR TROOPS! DUH! DUH! DUH! DUH! A million times DUH!!!!Again I say DUH! Which reminds me of a song. RUB A DUD DUB THREE MORINS IN A TUB BUSH CHENEY AND CONDO TOO SEND THEM TO IRAQ BOO HOO HOO
IT SUCKS BUT A LEAST IT RHYMES!
dougrambo
you're asking the wrong question.
"how" assumes that the "why" has been convincingly answered. just because not enough of people (the government and the military moreso than citizens, who seem to always be way ahead of them - especially on this) have been persuaded by the many good arguments for bringing troops home is no reason to stop making them. in fact, we should be making them more forcefully. once the "why" is sufficiently accepted, the "how" takes care of itself.
good to see the baltimore sun printing this. there seems to be more contrarian sentiment expressed in some of the smaller metropolitan papers (baltimore, san fran, seattle, madison,WI, philly).
dear born2bwild:
You are making an assumption that the people in charge upon having been given the "why" are going to go to the next step and "do the right thing" as if they only lack knowledge
of the situation. If I'm reading you wrong correct me. Your second assumption is that you are dealing with people that have emotions,a soul, a conscience. These people Cheney,Bush,Rice et all have sold their soul to EXXON,Halliburton,Bechtel,etc. They are BEYOND REASON AND CARE. THEY DON'T GIVE A DAMN ABOUT YOU AND ME THE FACT OUR SOLDIERS ARMS AND LEGS ARE BEING BLOWN OFF THE THOUSANDS OF DEAD CHILDREN,MAIMED IRAQIS,THESE PEOPLE ARE EVIL!!!!!!! As soon as you learn that you will begin to see what so many other Ameircans that go to work everday and think they live in a democracy of "We the People" We lost our government were living in a police global coporation type state where the only thing that matters is the BOTTOM LINE!!!!!!!!
Read the book The Bush Agenda, or Static by Amy Goodman and you will see our government has gone mad!!!!!!!!!! We wont be out of Iraq for years and years after many more people have died. Nuff Said!!!!
We won't.
"We" had the chance to pull the plug last month. Complicit Democrats torpedoed it.
When Will We Finally Pull The Plug? Are you insane, what kind of question is that? Ok, I'll answer it: in 50 years or until the last drop of oil is pumped out of Iraq, whichever comes first. We're there to stay, 14 military bases, an embassy the size of the Vatican, etc.
But what really infuriates me is to read posts saying that we'll stay as long as Bush and the Republicans are in office. It's the Dems' war now, and they're war-profiteering as much as the Repugs, don't kid yourself.
When will we finally pull the plug? Never, if the military industrial complex has its way. They're not building all those bases and the giant embassy over there for nothing.
dougrambo etc.
the basis of my position is that the peace/anti-war/alternative future community is gaining traction every day - it's not going away, it's getting stronger. one can't extrapolate the course of events in iraq simply based on the intentions of bush/cheney, because most of us know not only how demented they are, but also the utter futility and impossibility of their "grand" experiment. so yes, i agree, if it was up to them, things would unfold as you suggest. but it is no more in their power to control long-term events in the middle east, or anywhere else in the world for that matter, than it is to turn all of us checking in to common dreams into card-carrying republicans.
To stretch an already strained analogy further...
GW is actually bathing in said stagnant water, having already added great quantities of bubble-bath (cash), playing with a single rubber duck (Iraq's government) and plastic toy navy...
Pity is, that when George climbs out, he'll still be filthy.
March on DC July 4th