No End in Sight? Hell No!

[patrioticintellect]

...Now that we fully understand the situation, I will lay down a three-point plan that involves closure, which is what all Americans want if we are to withdraw and bring troops home. By closure, Americans don’t want to leave Iraq in ruin after we supposedly went in to bring freedom from dictatorship to Iraq. It also is bipartisan in that it puts control in the people’s hands and not Congress. We tell them to follow this plan because they have failed to do their job.

1) Conserve and Liberate

The use of those two words “conserve” and “liberate” will allow Democrats to frame the debate and replace “cut and run” with something that calls into question the patriotism of Republicans and not Democrats. Republicans, who are supposedly conservatives, will have to explain why more money should be spent on this war. Republicans will also have to explain why they would not want to “liberate” Iraq from our occupation. Having framed the debate correctly, Democrats can then advance the debate so that oil companies and contracting companies such as the now notorious Blackwater can be withdrawn. Only after withdrawal of all military forces, contracting companies, and oil companies will Iraq be able to become stable as magnets for stateless terrorism will be gone. UN peacekeepers or even better, peacekeeepers from neutral Islamic countries from the region can come in and clean out guerrillas who refuse to leave after we “liberate” Iraq.

2) Internationally Supervised Elections

The government in Iraq, while in place, is largely dysfunctional because we are meddling in its affairs. August of 2003 saw the bombing of the UN’s international headquarters in Baghdad, which ended up putting a limit on the supervision it could give to elections in January of 2005. The election had a lot of controversy despite the fact that Iraq gained a symbol of freedom---a blue thumb. International supervision was limited largely because the Bush administration wanted to make sure a leader to their liking was elected and therefore, the leaders elected may not quite be what the people of Iraq had intended to elect.

Internationally supervised elections are required to get the Iraqi government refocused on getting food, street security, electricity, and health care, which have become scarce since we plunged the country into chaos, to the people of Iraq.

3) Continue and Recommit to Humanitarian Aid

The people of Iraq, for all they have been through, deserve this commitment. In 1979, we began to support Saddam making him our dictator and our ally. Years later, we gave Saddam chemical and biological weapon materials, which he used to gas Kurds and do other horrifying things to the Iraqi people. Then, in the 1990s we put sanctions with the support of the UN on Iraq, which resulted in the deaths of over 500,000 children. And now we have a refugee crisis that we allowed to rise, which Amnesty International is now justly calling attention to.

Let’s not wait for another human rights non-governmental organization or advocacy to come forward before we choose to continue and recommit to going all the way with Iraq. Closure will be attained by solving Iraq’s humanitarian issues we have helped create...

*Excerpted from an article I wrote on OpEdNews. For the entire article, http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_kevin_go_070924_no_end_in_sight_3f_hel.htm">click here.

I'm very much interested in hearing thoughts on the three-point plan.

[The Traveler]

1. "Conserve and Liberate"

I like it ... both the logic behind it and the phrase.