Maybe, just maybe, our President gave us a way to come home out of Iraq. With a nephew over there (2nd tour) I'd be happy to see him come home. I'd also like to see this Iraqi mess over with, as long as we can do it with honor.
As I understand it, the President gave the Maliki .gov some fairly specific guidelines for help with his insurgency problem. 1) ease rules of engagement so we can actively target terrorists, 2) oil money has to be used for infrastructure 3) Mookie gets marginalized to the point of irrelevance, and 4) all those internal militias get disarmed or killed.
If Maliki buys into the plan and actively starts killing terrorists and building electrical plants, he gets a pass. If Maliki doesn't buy into the plan, we basically start loading planes and tell him "Bye-bye. Have fun with that genocide thing."
We've done a lot of good over there. We desposed Saddam. We gave the Iraqi people a working democracy. If they want to keep it, they'll have to get busy coming together as a nation and cut out all this sectarian bullshit. If not, we head home.
That's a plan I can support.
I agree with your statments. It is pass time that the Iraqi goverment stand and defend it's self.
ReplyDeleteThere should have been a #5: After we leave, you get no more protection, and you might even become a cruise missile target yourself.
ReplyDeleteYour #1 is a bit suspect to me. The only ROEs which Maliki imposed was to not kill Tater or any of the Mahdi Army.
The ROEs concerning trying to "arrest" terrorists instead of just shooting them, trying to pursue their vehicles instead of destroying them with gunfire, those ROEs are OUR invention, and nothing has been said about removing them.
If we do NOT remove them, and pursue the "insurgents" on a much more agressive basis, our effort is doomed.
I will only support the "surge" if I'm reliably informed that the military lawyers who were shipped in by the battalion are gone, and the troops freed to actually fight.
If that happens, we probably don't need the "surge" to win the war. If it doesn't happen, we could send every man Jack in the military over there, and we will still lose the war.
I'll hope for the best, but I wouldn't bet much on it.
ReplyDelete