August 18, 2009

         Democracy is a wonderful thing.  I read in today's Washington Post that Iraq may hold a vote on whether U.S. troops should leave.  The surprise is, the Post says, that if the Iraqis say "Go," we will.      I mean, they didn't ask us in, but they get to tell us to get out?  This is why we invaded them, conquering the country by force of arms?  Well, maybe.      When we invaded Iraq, the rationale was that they were a threat to the U.S. because they had weapons of mass destruction.  But they didn't.  They were thought to pose some kind of threat to us, to support the Taliban terrorists. Again, they didn't.      And we've stayed and stayed and stayed.  The war has killed several thousand Americans and many more Iraqis, a lot of them in factional fighting--Sunnis, Shia, Kurds, and so on.  Will they stop if we leave?  Probably not, but of course it hasn't stopped while we've stayed either.      We probably can't leave without a lot of windy talk about what a good job we've done there.  That's nonsense in my view, but listening to bad speeches is a small price to pay for ending a war we should never have started in the first place.     In fact, I'm delighted the Iraqis are going to vote on us, but my own preference is for quicker action.  Let's start loading the guys on the airplanes.  The war was always  a mistake.  Let's admit it and leave. 
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