President Bush is making a huge mistake seeking to achieve an agreement with Iraq on the U.S. military’s involvement in Iraq before he leaves office. He is putting in jeopardy the giant strides in security gains the U.S. and the Iraqi governments have made in reducing the violence and providing security in Iraq. There exists great sympathy for Muqtada al Sadr in so far as his anti-American agenda stance amongst Iraqis, no matter how unjust such anti-Americanism is. Pursuing this security agreement now just feeds this anti-American movement in Iraq and who knows how much violence will grow out of this movement. Moreover, the whole negotiation of this agreement has turned into an extremely counterproductive effort where reasonableness and responsible behavior is not ruling the day rather political pandering on both sides is. You have Maliki proclaiming he is not going to let the U.S. violate the Iraqi people’s sovereignty and stoking the Iraqi people’s national pride when there exists no dangers in that area for the Iraqi people, the American people’s intention are nothing but that of true friends of the Iraqi people on these issues. On the otherhand, you have Bush and his administration officials running around like their chickens with their heads cut-off trying to reach a deal so to try to preserve President Bush’s legacy on Iraq and change it from that of he left the American people and the world a super huge problem of what will become of that territory presently the country of Iraq that has enormous wealth and unfortunately an infinite potential to export Islamic extremism. You have the Administration’s diplomats willing to quickly throw away the protections of U.S. law for the private security staff that provide security to U.S. government personnel in Iraq without fully pleading their case and working to have what is right done by these people who should be considered our people, as dear to us as the people they protect (where is our nation’s character here?).
The Iraqi and U.S. government should put off until six or maybe eight to nine months (allowing for Senate confirmations) after the next U.S. President takes office the deadline for reaching an agreement on this matter. In that time the security picture will be clearer the world will have a better picture of whether or not the current security gains in Iraq are holding and what are the capabilities of Iraq’s security forces and what assistance Iraq needs from the U.S.. Both the Iraqi and the American peoples are going to elect new governments this year, it is only fair to both these peoples and these new governments to let these new governments work out the agreement because these new government are the ones who are going to have to live with it and make it work. And this is really no small issue for the next U.S. president who is going to have to get Congress to pay for the U.S. involvement in Iraq; passage of Iraq war funding supplemental bills on occasion in the past have been just short of miraculous and it is going to be tougher to pass such bills in the future with the sky high energy prices and the economic downturn the country is and likely for quite a while to be experiencing and the ill will to government spending amongst Americans this will generate.
Obviously, there is currently a lot of public posturing going on both on the Iraqi and the U.S. sides which is not facilitating a realistic, reasonable and good agreement being reached and hopefully if talks are put off for seven months the atmosphere for reaching a good and fair agreement will exists. Iraq is in a war; you have al Qaeda, Sunni, Shiite and other militant groups fighting to defeat the Iraq central government and the democratic, human rights based country it represents. To be fair to the American Armed forces, the Iraqi government can’t expect the American government to fight with one armed tied behind its back so to speak, it can’t accept effectiveness restrictions, when the American Army goes to war it goes to war with everything it has to defeat the enemy. The American people experienced effectiveness restrictions on the American Army in the Vietnam War and it was a disaster in terms of mission effectiveness and casualties, the American people will not accept such restrictions again. If the American Army has the enemy in its sights it must be allowed to capture or kill that enemy as it sees fit. If the American army captures enemy combatants it must be able to fully interrogate them and hold them until it is confident they pose no threat in the war. The American Army’s airplanes must have access to all of the country of Iraq so they can determine how enemy forces are being supplied and trained and be able to destroy those enemy forces and supplies wherever they are found before they have a chance to kill Iraqi civilians or American or Iraqi security personnel.
In the alternative, the Iraqi Government is the supreme security authority in Iraq. If the Iraqi government doesn’t want U.S. ground forces operating in a certain community so be it, the ...[Message truncated]