Thank You to everyone who has commented on this article. I know there are people out there who feel the same as I do. We DO have to stick together.
Yes we do need someone like Senator Feingold - I only hope that he feels the same way!
Kudos to everyone again!!

So….big to-do, when do the troops get recalled?
Feingold et.al. can keep playing ping-pong with the Iraq issue, but this next year will be really telling as to what, if any, real changes can be expected on the issue of any of our troops staying in Iraq. How much oil stock does FEINGOLD have? Hmmm….‘follow the money’, indeed…

My Country Right or Wrong?

If you accept that framing of the issue, you have already lost the battle. The Rabid Right is very clever at claiming the moral high ground from a position deep in Death Valley. For one thing, the Rabid Right is not my country. Opinions expressed by the Rabid Right are not traditional American values and do not represent my values. Though millions of Americans have mindlessly accepted these lies, millions of Americans haven’t.

The United State of America is not a Democracy, it’s a plutocracy.

The plutocrat’s omniscient and omnipotent propaganda machine, the mass media . . .  represents their interests and values, not mine or millions of other Americans.

Of course it’s a cover-up since that’s what happens when the criminals are put in charge of investigating their own criminal behavior.  So it’s a waste for us to pay any attention to this Iraq Study Group Report.  What instead?
TROOPS OUT NOW, that’s what.

Regarding Iraq Study Group, Condĩ Rice has said: “I’ve been doing some deep thinking on Iraq-which, if you don’t mind, I’ll share with the President”.

“Share” what ? the king bed ? Nobody mind what you’ve done except Laura the queen. Also the King doesn’t need “deep” thinking because just “shallow” will be enough.

To have not secured our own borders and say that we are fighting a “war on terrorism” has to be the pinnacle of hypocrisy even for Bush & Co.
This is a failed government on every conceivable issue, even the ones they create.
Republicans in general are fond of saying that if the government was run like a business the country would be far better off.
What CEO, COO, CFO etc. would still be around in a major corporation with the six year track record of Bush & Co.? What average worker?
Do we just say “Great job Georgie, here’s your presidential library” after his and the country’s 8 year sentence is up?  Medals of Freedom all around.
Hercules task of cleaning out the Augean stables is going to seem like a walk in the park to whoever is unlucky enough to win the next presidential election.
It’s like a scene out of Glengarry/Glenross - first prize, a set of steak knives, second prize - President of the U.S.
IMPEACH these clowns now and start the cleaning process sooner rather than later.

Dear Senator Feingold,
Keep this up and you got my vote for president.

The point is, as George Packer (via Jim Henley, who makes a number of important points on this subject) points out in this essay, that there are a lot of Iraqis to whom we owe a debt. The local staff of embassies, intelligence informers, members of coalition-friendly political parties. They are at very great risk indeed of being massacred after we leave.

Any plan to remove troops from Iraq, then, needs to be accompanied by a plan to evacuate a lot of Iraqis who will become refugees. The CIA’s estimate for South Vietnam was that 200,000 Vietnamese were owed a ticket out (including families); the number for Iraq is unlikely to be less than half as many.

However, there is no plan for importing 100,000 Iraqis to the USA and UK. As Pamela Hartman’s article in the LA Daily News points out (via John Quiggin on the Crooked Timber blog), the US immigration department is allowing less than a thousand visas at present. The UK is actually deporting asylum seekers back to Iraq.

The eventual exit will be chaotic unless it is planned and the precedent of Vietnam is atrocious. The “loyal” South Vietnamese army held American diplomats as hostages on some occasions to ensure their own safety and to get (rare) seats on planes out of the country. There were riots at the evacuation points. People tried to cling on to the landing gear of aeroplanes.

The only thing I can say at this point is that if you have Iraqi friends, online or otherwise, they need to be aware of what happened in Vietnam (and for that matter, in Cambodia). The situation will not get better if given time. The coalition forces will leave. It will not necessarily be possible to evacuate nearer the time. It is a terrible thing to say, and of course it probably makes the eventual disaster even more inevitable, but any Iraqis with friendly ties to the coalition forces really ought to be looking after themselves and planning their own way out, right now.

The last line of Snepp’s book is rather telling:

The last CIA message from the embassy declared: “Let’s hope we do not repeat history. This is Saigon station signing off.”

Iraq is a disaster. 1000’s are leaving weekly, estimates are up to 1.5million have already left as refuges.  Further think carefully on this article.

Simple, chilling lessons
Daniel Davies
December 7, 2006 07:03 PM

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/daniel_davies/2006/12/the_decent_interval_has_begun.html

I am glad that the period has ended during which it was considered unserious or politically naive to draw comparisons between Iraq and Vietnam. With the publication of the Baker report and the recommendation to begin withdrawing combat troops while leaving military advisers in place, the US government is quite transparently moving toward a policy exactly like “Vietnamisation”.

The lessons of Vietnam are simple and chilling, and spelt out in Frank Snepp’s excellent book Decent Interval. The withdrawal has begun, and all that is left is a face-saving period during which it can be made to appear that the US has “not won but not lost”. But that does not mean that the disaster is over.

The first lesson of Vietnam is that the policy of the “decent interval” creates perverse incentives for our client government. The idea behind consolidation and gradual withdrawal is to reduce our presence over time, while maintaining support for the Iraqi government as it makes the transition from chaos to independence.

However, when translated into practical terms, the message that we are giving to the current Iraqi political class is that we are going to withdraw the lifeline of troops and money, unless there are disasters. Therefore, there will be disasters.

The Thieu government in Vietnam certainly regularly created military disasters in order to try to persuade the Americans to increase military aid, and I see no reason to believe that the Iraqi government will not respond in the same way to the same set of incentives. The Baker report does not seem to have any detailed plan about how the transition to stability in Iraq is going to be achieved, and the assumption has to be that it will not be achieved.

The second lesson from Vietnam, however, is that the sheer logistics of a withdrawal from a combat zone are the sort of thing that needs planning, and it is very worrying indeed that no such plan seems to exist. The frightening, harrowing thing about Snepp’s book is that he describes in detail how an unwillingness to indulge in “defeatism” meant that the abandonment of Vietnam was much more disastrous than it would have been with proper planning.

Senator Feingold——We the people of the USA need you! You are a person of honesty and integrity, Please run for the presidency!! Our country is sick and I believe you could be the doctor to get it back on its feet again!! God bless you and God bless our country and also to our troops.May they come home soon! Why should another die for a lie!!!

How much do we pay for this group ? Nothing for free, right ?

We should add Kenneth Starr to this team because he was an expert to draw all “phanton lines” to make big bucks.