We should not be spending lives and treasure to help our enemies

A reader writes:

Larry,

In response to that outrageous Iraqi statement, you wrote:

“The statement is totally unacceptable. The Bush administration should issue an ultimatum declaring the following: Either the Iraqis immediately retract the statement, or we will forthwith pull our forces out of central Iraq to Kurdistan, which we will then use as a base from which to topple any troublesome regime that gets into power in Iraq, but we will no longer have anything to do with internal Iraqi affairs, including the rebuilding of the country.”

RIGHT ON! Why should we be fighting to prop up a government who stabs us in the back like this? Why doesn’t some reporter ask Bush about this?

The Kurdistan option is a good one, avoiding the opposing pitfalls of sinking deeper into a quagmire and suddenly pulling the plug. It could be the best option at this point in time.

Allan Wall
Iraq

I shared this with the correspondent who had initially suggested the “withdraw to Kurdistan” option to me a couple of years ago, and he wrote back:

And I seem to remember it was my idea. Ha! I may redeem my mistake of supporting this d*mn war.

My reply:

The point is, we’ve been discussing this idea for a couple of years as an alternative (among others) to the present policy, but nothing had made it crystalize. Also, I wrote a long time ago, “I support a winnable war for national defense. I don’t support an unwinnable war for democratization.” But even that was still a general statement, it didn’t crystalize into an immediate position that we get out. I have never agreed with the idea of an immediate withdrawal. (Of course, the people who have been pushing immediate withdrawal do not favor, as we do, a permanent U.S. base in Kurdistan to watch over the region—they don’t want us to defend ourselves against our jihadist enemies at all.) The communiqué by those Iraqi leaders crystalizes it. We shouldn’t be there. Period. Not a single American life to help Iraq.

Now we have an honorable, clear, unquestionable basis to get out of there. The effing leaders of the effing government that we’ve helped set up regard our soldiers as legitimate targets of the terror insurgency. That’s it. It’s over.

Ken Hechtman, my leftist correspondent in Quebec, writes:

There’s a lesson for the anti-war movement in this.

For more than two years, we’ve been telling anybody who’d listen that this was exactly what “our” Iraqis thought of us. Anybody who paid attention to what they were saying in Iraq, in Arabic, has known it. Look through the 2003 archives of Electronic Iraq or Juan Cole’s site and it’s all there.

But until they say it themselves, in English, to the American press, it’s not real. As you say, it doesn’t crystallize.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 22, 2005 08:25 PM | Send