Friday, July 15, 2005

Promised Column 1 - Timetables

I was against the war in Iraq from the get-go. There were several reasons for it; two of the most important ones being that I felt the intelligence on the WMDs was, to be polite, iffy at best (and the fact that I could tell it was iffy while other, supposedly more intelligent people than I couldn't was wonderful for my cynical attitude) and my opinion that the Bush Admin. was both woefully unprepared for the war and the rebuilding, and at the same time not willing to give everything necessary to truly be able to make an impact.

I was wrong about the war. So I'm three out of four - which is a better percentage than George's Bush's statements about Iraq.

But, even with my opposition to the war, my borne-out feeling that people in the Administration were doing a bad job of preparing for trouble, and my confirmed opinion of the WMDs, I still think that trying to set a timetable is plain stupid. (Keeping up their near-perfect record of stupidity on the war, it seems the Bush Admin. may now considering a pullout to a timetable. This is the kind of consistency we could do without.)

Put simply, I believe in the Powell Doctrine: If you go to war, you go all out until the objective is fulfilled. You don't half-ass it, you don't shortchange it, you don't send troops in without necessary armor or training, you don't hope for the best without preparing for the worse. And you don't stop until the job is done.

If you do that, you're opening the door for something worse to happen. And holding to some kind of timetable for withdrawal before Iraq is free is akin to saying, "Well, I'll operate on that tumor until 8 o'clock, and then it's quitting time!" We can't leave until Iraq can handle itself, and with the Bush people floating proposals in that area without any standards to meet, the idiocy is brought full circle. They f*cked it up from start to finish.

Way to go guys. There will be some medals awarded for this one.



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