US Policy On Iraq Backfires

I was recently browsing through a few blogs to see the general reaction regarding George Bush's plan to send more troops to Iraq in the aftermath of the execution of Saddam Hussein. I came across ModernOpinion's editorial on the troop surge from which i quote the following text:

I think we should be totally committed to restoring peace in the nation, as much as we are reasonably able, or simply fly our boys home. Yet, if we withdraw now, as the president mentioned, the unstable Iraqi government would collapse and likely cripple the entire nation for decades to come. Understandably, however, we don't want to spend so much time, funding, and military energy on this little country that we endanger our ability to face other threats, even more serious threats, in the future.

Isn't that very far out from reality? Here is what i believe is the reality and what should be America's policy.

The exasperation has been wearing thin among the American public at large as the sobering milestone of 3,000 American deaths was reached on the last day of 2006.But Bush did not have any immediate cheery word. “Bringing Saddam Hussein to justice will not end the violence in Iraq.”, he commented.

Mr Bush welcomed Hussein’s hanging as “an important milestone on Iraq’s course to becoming a democracy”. Washington invaded Iraq by inventing lies about “weapons of mass destruction”. It brutalised Iraqi society, imposed collective punishment on its people, and carried out terrible atrocities in Abu Ghraib and Fallujah. An overwhelming majority of Iraqis regard US troops at an inimical force. A University of Maryland poll says 78 per cent of Iraqis believe US troops are “provoking more conflict” than they’re preventing; 71 per cent, including 74 per cent of Shias, and 91 per cent of Sunnis, want them out. Sixty-one per cent of Iraqis actually favour attacks on American troops. Unsuprisingly, Iraq has a flourishing insurgency. The average number of daily attacks on US troops have risen from 14 in July 2003, to 70 two years later, to 185 now. Today, the Iraqi regime’s writ does not run beyond the four-mile square known as the Green Zone.

NOBODY could miss noticing that during his recent visit to Amman, the capital of Jordan, where he met the Prime Minister of the embattled government of Iraq, Mr Nuri al-Maliki, the United States President, Mr George W Bush was a markedly diminished man, notwithstanding his overblown rhetoric. Nothing could have demonstrated his misery more vividly than that he had to receive his Iraqi “ally” and protégé in the Jordanian capital, not in Baghdad. He just could not dare step into the city the US-led coalition forces claim to have “liberated” from Saddam Hussein’s “misrule”. Baghdad has indeed become a byword for seemingly uncontrollable violence and anarchy.

On his way to Jordan, Mr Bush attended the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation summit at Riga, where he proclaimed that US troops would not leave the battlefield in Iraq, “Until the mission was complete.” After his meeting with Mr Maliki in Amman, he claimed, “This business about ‘graceful exit’ simply has no realism to it at all”. Many of his listeners laughed in their sleeves. They knew that if anyone was out of touch with reality, it was the US president.

I do recommend you to visit the site ModernOpinion and read a few articles that give opposing perspectives to what the world thinks.