Great News From Iraq!

Actually, no. Knight-Ridder has been analyzing statistics from the Pentagon itself, and is now proclaiming that, short of a major change, the US will lose in Iraq. They've got some interesting figures showing the downward spiral, but the most interesting one is probably that attacks on US personnel have increased from roughly 700-800 in November 2003 to close to 2,500 in October 2004.

Many people I've spoken to, even people who opposed the war from the beginning, keep saying to me that the US should stay and "fix what they broke", so to speak. But this, I think, misses the point: The US no longer has the ability to effect policy in Iraq. In order to fix anything, they would need to be in control. With the latest news about the "elections" (more than half of Iraq simply will not be able to vote because of the poor security conditions) we can say the one thing that the US doesn't have is control.

The US will not be able to fix anything before they are forced to leave. Therefore, they should leave now. Actually, they should never have gone in the first place, as this war was unlikely to have proceeded any other way with this bunch of criminals in power. The point is, the US is going to have to leave sooner or later, and nothing they do now will survive their departure. That said, the only thing that leaving later rather than sooner will accomplish is raise the body count.

The only rational course of action is to leave, and soon. Or, they can reinstate the draft, send a couple hundred thousand black and brown kids to Iraq, waste a few thousand more lives, and then leave anyway. Knowing this bunch for four years now, it terrifies me that I can't say the latter course is impossible.