Bring the Troops Home
Comment Bring the Troops Home The United States should pull out of Iraq. Already, the United States has lost more than 1,350 soldiers. Already, about 10,000 U.S. soldiers have been wounded, at a...
...Little wonder, then, that more than 5,000 U.S...
...Now we are told that the elections are a turning point...
...It laid off hundreds of thousands of people in the army and other areas of the public sector...
...military destroyed Fallujah in order to save it...
...At some point, the United States will be forced out...
...soldiers were occupiers and 57 percent said that U.S...
...But the only turning point will be when the U.S...
...military in Iraq...
...Better to grasp that now, and leave, than to stay and get mired all the more...
...But the United States is incapable of fixing it, as more and more Americans will realize over time...
...I think the resistance is bigger than the U.S...
...But we also recognize that the array of forces does not favor U.S...
...troops should leave immediately...
...troops were justified...
...Go now before more blood flows...
...Second, we are told that if we leave, we will be helping Al Qaeda...
...troops since Bush launched the war, with 503 U.S...
...That is just one-tenth what the Iraqi intelligence director estimates...
...Bring the troops home...
...We do not romanticize the insurgents, much less approve of their tactics...
...soldier shooting the wounded, unarmed Iraqi in a mosque, or the U.S...
...troops come home...
...And the CIA predicts that by staying in Iraq, the United States may precipitate an all-out civil war...
...It is time to face facts...
...By remaining in Iraq, the United States will end up sacrificing more of its soldiers and more Iraqi civilians in a hopeless cause...
...soldiers have leveled thousands of homes and detained more than 10,000 Iraqi men without charges...
...military presence in Iraq is counterproductive and wrong...
...The situation in Iraq shows no signs of stabilizing...
...soldiers had died in Vietnam...
...The alternative, ultimately, is mass slaughter...
...Things have gotten so bad some Iraqis are telling reporters that life was better for them under Saddam Hussein...
...The Shiites are in the majority, and Al Qaeda is a Sunni-based movement...
...And the occupation has failed...
...and allied troops grew from an estimated 1,400 attacks in September to 1,600 in October and 1,950 in November," Robert Burns of AP reported...
...Bush and Rumsfeld have also suggested that each point along the road was a turning point...
...We believe it is now clear that the continuing U.S...
...What a sad and telling indictment that is...
...In a December Washington Post-ABC News poll, 56 percent of Americans concluded that, given the costs, the war was not worth the price...
...Third, some people say we have a moral obligation to clean up our mess in Iraq...
...Then there is the cost in American dollars...
...That is too high a price for us to pay in American blood...
...According to The New York Times, more than 100,000 U.S...
...soldiers and their families...
...Most alarmingly, more than 50 percent said that, in some circumstances, attacks on U.S...
...And that's understandable...
...Meanwhile, the ranks of the insurgents are growing...
...The capture of Saddam himself was supposed to be a turning point...
...The resistance is more than 200,000 people," General Mohamed Abdullah Shahwani, Iraq's intelligence service director, told Agence France-Presse...
...Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's personnel policies have made things worse, with "stop-loss" orders forcing soldiers and members of the Reserves and National Guard to stay in Iraq months longer than they were promised...
...According to a study done by public health officials from Johns Hopkins University, the actual total is much higher...
...The American Friends Service Committee...
...In November 2003, by contrast, the number of attacks was 864...
...The invasion was illegal and foolish in the first place...
...The departure of the United States "entails risks," as Harvard Professor Stanley Hoffmann acknowledged in a piece for The New York Review of Books...
...Bush should therefore set a date for departure in 2005 and stick to it...
...soldiers and more than a million Vietnamese...
...attacks...
...Or the Iraqi people themselves will have to solve their own problems...
...Then they said there were a couple of thousand, which was revised upward to 5,000 and now to 20,000, including part-timers...
...leveling of Fallujah run on an endless loop on Arab and Muslim TV around the world...
...The United States has spent about $160 billion so far on this war, and the yearly price tag is rising toward $100 billion...
...We recognize that many of them are hard-core Islamic fundamentalists...
...What's more, the Bush Administration has bungled the occupation from the start...
...But because LBJ refused to change course, he ended up being responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands more U.S...
...First, we are told that if we leave, there may be a civil war in Iraq...
...But there are some messes that the mess-maker is incapable of cleaning up...
...soldiers, how many more Iraqi civilians, must die before Americans insist that U.S...
...General Mohamed Abdullah Shahwani, Iraq's intelligence service director "The war in Iraq has become a costly trap from which the United States should extricate itself soon...
...As a result of Bush's Iraq War, another generation of American soldiers faces the horror of post-traumatic stress disorder...
...This is draining our Treasury of much-needed revenue...
...occupation...
...And Bush is a pyromaniac...
...It will do more harm than good by staying...
...What's more, Bush is helping Al Qaeda by staying in Iraq...
...It did not prevent the wholesale looting of Baghdad ("Stuff happens," said Rumsfeld...
...Some of the more violent will join up with Al Qaeda, which is now 18,000 strong, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London...
...The occupation is inflaming hatred against the United States among a new generation of Arabs and Muslims...
...It's deeply unsatisfying to see the shambles Bush has made and not try to fix it...
...Although an elected Iraqi government would be in a strong position to ask other countries, especially in the Muslim world, to provide the forces needed by the U.N., it may find those countries unwilling to risk their soldiers' lives...
...It is very unlikely Al Qaeda will take over Iraq...
...Rousting Muqtada al-Sadr out of Najaf was supposed to be a turning point...
...Shahwani said the number includes at least 40,000 hardcore fighters but rises to more than 200,000 members counting part-time fighters and volunteers who provide rebels everything from intelligence and logistics to shelter...
...The number of attacks on U.S...
...soldiers perishing...
...And it does not belong there today...
...The United States never belonged in Iraq...
...Under the direction of Paul Bremer, it privatized the economy to serve U.S...
...Their study, published in the British medical journal the Lancet, says at least 100,000 civilians have died, the majority falling victim to U.S...
...troops there until "civil order is restored," however...
...The United Nations, in the meantime, has the option of putting together a real multinational peacekeeping force...
...And the attacks keep mounting...
...corporations...
...The top general in the Army Reserve, James R. Helmly, in a memo to the Army chief of staff, said the Reserves are "rapidly degenerating into a broken force...
...And U.S...
...But the United States has no role to play...
...turns around and leaves...
...The pictures of Abu Ghraib and the images of the U.S...
...As Hoffmann writes: "Preventing a bloody disintegration of Iraq, and preventing a takeover of Iraq by Islamic extremist terrorists if new Iraqi security forces prove to be inadequate, should be left to international diplomacy by the U.N...
...First, they said there were just a few foreign fighters and Saddam dead-enders...
...Any hope that it could somehow win in Iraq has long since faded...
...But we believe the United States has neither the right nor the capacity to contribute to a solution...
...The U.S...
...troops...
...Bush says he has liberated the people of Iraq, but the vast majority considers the U.S...
...Taking back Fallujah was supposed to be a turning point...
...A breakup of the country can by no means be ruled out...
...Last spring, in a poll of more than 3,000 Iraqis for USA Today, 71 percent said the U.S...
...presence as an army of occupation, not liberation...
...Iraq is one of them...
...Up until 1965, 1,864 U.S...
...troops have deserted...
...For instance, the Administration says it can't afford $300 million more for Pell grants-less than 0.5 percent of what it is spending on this war...
...The objections to leaving are not persuasive...
...According to Iraqbodycount.net, as of January 5, Bush's war has killed between 15,080 to 17,285 civilians...
...All along, Bush and Rumsfeld have low-balled the number of people fighting the U.S...
...The deaths of Saddam Hussein's brutal sons, Uday and Qusay, were supposed to be a turning point...
...Quite the contrary...
...Poor students can't go to college because Bush went off half-cocked...
...But that organization compiles statistics only from published reports...
...Other Arab or Muslim nations could also contribute to it...
...soldiers have been wounded, at a rate now of almost 1,000 a month...
...But there is essentially a civil war going on right now...
...bombing of a residential home with a 500-pound bomb-this provides additional footage for the next bin Laden video...
...The same poll showed that 58 percent of Americans supported keeping the U.S...
...troops, and that the more brutal the U.S...
...Conflict over a new constitution could lead to a civil war, or to foreign interventions, say, by Iran helping the Iraqi Shiite clerics, or by Turkey trying to prevent Kurdish secession...
...Stanley Hoffmann, The New York Review of Books "We urge the immediate withdrawal of U.S...
...It did not provide electricity and clean water in a timely fashion...
...The United States is an occupying power, and no population likes to be occupied, as even Bush himself has acknowledged...
...How many more U.S...
...response, the more the insurgency grows...
...Then there are the Iraqi civilians who have died...
...The morbid pace of chaos is increasing...
...As the British learned in Iraq eight decades ago, and as the French learned in Algeria five decades ago, so the Americans must learn in Iraq that an occupied people will eventually oust the occupiers...
...troops who have served in Iraq are expected to require mental health treatment...
...The transfer of power at the end of June was supposed to be a turning point...
...Every time there is a new atrocity-like the U.S...
...and regional organizations, as well as to international peacemaking forces provided by them and by individual countries...
...The last six months of 2004 were the deadliest for U.S...
...Our leaders are not leveling with the American people, or with U.S...
...So why should we stay to prevent a civil war when we are in the process of creating one...
...The pyromaniac does not make a very good firefighter...
Vol. 69 • February 2005 • No. 2
