Gotta give Senator Joe Biden some credit for this one. In an interview with the Post, Biden said that Bush and Cheney know that the war in Iraq is "lost" and that they just don't want to "be the guy landing helicopters inside the Green Zone, taking people off the roof," a la Saigon, 1975. More quotes:
"I have reached the tentative conclusion that a significant portion of this administration, maybe even including the vice president, believes Iraq is lost," Biden said. "They have no answer to deal with how badly they have screwed it up. I am not being facetious now. Therefore, the best thing to do is keep it from totally collapsing on your watch and hand it off to the next guy -- literally, not figuratively."Of course, Biden is not exactly right that there is nothing the Senate can do. Practically speaking, though, he's right that the most likely path to end the war is when Republican senators "walk away" from Bush's Iraq policy, and go down to the White House and tell the president it's time to get out.
"There is nothing a United States Senate can do to stop a president from conducting his war," Biden said. "The only thing that is going to change the president's mind, if he continues on a course that is counterproductive, is having his party walk away from his position."
Biden said that Vice President Cheney and former defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld "are really smart guys who made a very, very, very, very bad bet, and it blew up in their faces. Now, what do they do with it? I think they have concluded they can't fix it, so how do you keep it stitched together without it completely unraveling?"
Comments (5)
"I think they have concluded they can't fix it, so how do you keep it stitched together without it completely unraveling?"
Change the players?
Get rid of the military brass that don't want to go along with your plan? (Casey & Abizaid)
Install a top neocon at the UN? (Khalilzad)
What do you make of the recent personnel moves?
p.s. loved your article "The Surge to Nowhere" put out yesterday on tomdispatch.com. Not pretty indeed.
Posted by Margaret | January 5, 2007 11:42 AM
Posted on January 5, 2007 11:42
When do we get back to where you not only recognize but MENTION that the reason we are in Iraq is to control its oil?
You seem to have joined the babbling crowd of maundering morons who would rather talk about "winning" something in Iraq than about our coveting oil, lying to go to war so as to steal control of 110 billion barrels of oil, and murdering hundreds of thousands of innocent people in the process.
Get back to reality: the discussion OUGHT to be about WHY we NEED to steal oil, and what will happen if we do not.
If the question were about staying in or leaving Iraq, then the answer would be patently obvious, but if you keep on refusing to talk about why we went there in the first place, then you never will get to a discussion of the real world, only a silly dialog about the outright senselessness that pretends that we had some other objective than pilfering oil.
Face the fact that an oil-less Iraq would never have felt the first American boot on her soil, and you are half way home. Get into why it is necessary for the "richest country on earth" to steal oil from an impoverished arab land, and you will begin to make sense of it all.
Posted by SamSnedegar | January 6, 2007 2:29 AM
Posted on January 6, 2007 02:29
Although a lot of people prefer to think that there are more reasons than OIL for why we attacked Iraq, this fellow seems to agree with you Sam:
"New Oil Law Means Victory in Iraq for Bush"
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/010807A.shtml
Posted by Margaret | January 8, 2007 2:15 PM
Posted on January 8, 2007 14:15
American's are losing in Iraq because last November the American PEOPLE as a nation, blinked. The huge and powerful American military may again be defeated (certainly if you, the MSM and the Democrats have their way) because the American people have no stomach to fight a war that is fundamentally different to the one they love to watch in the movies. The one where John Wayne and the marines save the day, nobody actually dies and the worst injury is a blood nose. Americans really love their soft lives and the myth of their great military power. They would really rather be watching football than even thinking about a war they have to fight to save that cherished life. The Democrats have proved that an unrelenting defeatist attitude can bring down an entire country well before the Islamic radicals have actually done it. The thing these defeatists cannot do is project beyond their next election and understand just what America and the rest of the world will have to deal with in a future where Iran controls the oil of the middle-east and WMD once again are in the hands of a ferocious and implacable enemy intent on destroying the US and now with no opposition. Do Americans really think that if only they could get out of Iraq everything else would just go away and they could return to their cozy lives? Now THAT would be a terrible state of denial. I must say that I'll be surprised to see this comment on your blog.
Posted by Kay | January 14, 2007 2:40 PM
Posted on January 14, 2007 14:40
Congress can cut off the funding, that's how US involvement in Vietnam was finally ended during the Ford administration. Even if Congress can't agree to do that for Iraq, they must now cut all funding for an attack on Iran, which BushCheney are pining for. There is grave danger now that US will attack Iran under some pretext (remember the Gulf of Tonkin). This will be very destructive to the US economy and foreign relations. Especially if they choose to use nukes against alleged Iranian nuclear development sites. We will be buried by the political and economic fallout. But BushCheney are crazy enough to do anything to cover their mistakes in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Posted by Charles Peterson | February 3, 2007 2:12 AM
Posted on February 3, 2007 02:12