Pull Out of Iraq This Year

Pull Out of Iraq This Year

 ' Three years ago, public opinion polls indicated that a majority of Americans believed our policymakers were wrong in ordering troops into Iraq. It is widely accepted that this sentiment more than any other factor in the 2006 congressional elections resulted in Democratic majorities in both the House and Senate.

' Are we now going to ignore for another three years the public mandate of 2006 against this costly, preemptive war based on deceit? And how can we justify putting thousands more U.S. troops into Afghanistan? We have already exhausted our treasury. We are also close to exhausting our soldiers.

' Can there be any doubt that the enormous war cost has contributed to the financial crisis here at home? The expense of waging two Middle East wars, plus the loss of revenue caused by the previous administration's tax cuts, have skyrocketed the national debt to a record high. Do we ever consider what the interest alone is on our $10-trillion national debt -- much of it paid to China?

' Frankly, we cannot afford a two-war commitment year after year if we want to balance the federal budget and restore our economy. The huge bonuses that directors of failing corporations have awarded themselves and their chief executives have rightfully angered people, but those figures are peanuts compared with the $12 billion a month we have poured into Iraq and Afghanistan over the last six years.

' Of course, the most painful cost of these wars is the deaths of more than 4,200 brave American troops and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians. This is to say nothing of the decline of our political judgment and moral standing in the world.

' The Obama administration recommends we leave 50,000 troops in Iraq to "police" that troubled country through 2011. There may well be flare-ups that will keep them there indefinitely, struggling to police the war-induced chaos.

' In June 1950, President Truman ordered our troops into Korea, stating it would only be a brief police action that did not require a declaration of war. Three years later and after 38,000 American soldiers had been killed, the new American president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, the commander of Allied forces in World War II, promptly ended our involvement in the Korean War, to the relief of our combat soldiers and the American public.

' Unfortunately, Washington left 40,000 American soldiers behind to police the 38th Parallel -- for a brief time. Yet, more than 50 years later, nearly 30,000 American troops are still in South Korea. So much for brief police actions.

' My generation has lived through half a dozen wars, beginning with World War II and then Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and several smaller conflicts. The only one of those wars I really believed in and still do was the U.S. participation in World War II, in which I served as a combat bomber pilot against Hitler's Nazi Germany.

' I believe we aging veterans have an obligation to share what we have learned with the American people and with our young president, who seems open to well-meant suggestions.

' In that spirit, I urge President Obama to bring our troops home from the Middle East this year. A good target date for completing an orderly withdrawal from two ill-conceived and costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would be Thanksgiving 2009.

' For our sake and God's sake, let's get out of there and begin healing our own bankrupted land.'

A lot of the young folks who supported you, Mike, may not know who George McGovern is. He's about ten years Mike's senior. Served in the senate for one term before Mike and during Mike's two terms, and ran for President and against the Vietnam War in 1972. George McGovern flew a bomber over Europe during WWII, as he points out above. He never mentioned it during his campaign, although he was painted as a weakling by the macho military types who defended the Vietnam war at the time, and who still do. Richard Nixon won, was caught for spying on the Democrats at the Watergate during the campaign, and the war continued until Gerry Ford ended it.

Mike called for an end to the Iraq war within sixty days, later expanded to one hundred twenty, during his campaign for the Democratic nomination last year. The war would have been over for a year and a half now if the senators on the podium with him in Carolina when he made that statement and laid out its means of accomplishment had stepped up to the plate, Obama/Clinton among them.

Notice that now George McGovern has to appeal to people's depression at the Depression and the war's cost to try to end it.

The war was wrong from the very beginning and its gotten worse and worse since. Obama's escalation of the Afghanistan War and his inauguration of the fabulously expensive and arbitrarily cruel and wrong Robot War against innocent Pakistanis both seem to be no problem.

War has always played well to us Americans. It's what we do. Somehow the idea of people dying at the hands of Americans in foreign lands just seems right to us. It certainly isn't repugnant enough to get us actually to do anything to end it. We are a nation of War Criminals. The silent majority, as Richard Nixon used to call us.

Individually of course we're all good guys and gals. We love our dogs and are generally civil to people within our own ethno/economic classes. We just accept the fact that somewhere on earth there are always people who need killing, and its our job to do it. God set us to it. Even if we go broke doing it. It's our duty.

It does not have to be this way. I encourage you all to let Barack Obama know that you're on to him. That he's a murderer and a war criminal just as George XLIII was before him. And that his regime is shaping up as indistinguishable from Bush's, except of course for its advertising campaign. Its branding. Change we can believe in. Change would be to end the war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, the war in Pakistan, and the war in Palestine by Thanksgiving.