LET'S FACE IT! WE WILL BE IN IRAQ FOREVER TAKING MORE AND MORE CASUALTIES

General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker have come and gone and everything is status quo in the Iraq war. And the saddest part of their dog 'n pony show before Congress and anyone who cared to watch the hearings on TV is that NOTHING is going to change in the foreseeable future in Iraq.

The US military will be in Iraq FOREVER unless someone has the guts to pull the plug on this idiotic war and let the Iraqis sort out everything for themselves.

I'm sick to death of hearing how Iraq will turn into a quagmire if we pull out. Iraq is a quagmire NOW and pulling out isn't going to make a particle of difference.

Who is going to be the LAST soldier to die for Bush's horrendous foreign policy blunder? I doubt anyone reading this right now will be around by the time the LAST US soldier is killed in Iraq. McCain wants our troops in Iraq for another 100 or a 1,000 years, but ONLY if they are not getting killed or wounded. Who in their right mind can make that kind of promise about Iraq? It is much too volatile to say nobody is going to be killed or wounded in Iraq.

There have already been 28 US soldiers KILLED in the first nine days of April. What is changing in Iraq that will change that? The answer, of course, is NOTHING is changing. It is only getting worse every single day in Iraq with no light at the end of the tunnel.

On Thursday, President Bush will boast about reducing tours in Iraq from 15 months to 12 months, but here is the HOOKER. This does NOT apply to troops already in IRAQ. The order would only be for fresh troops going to IRAQ and there are NO fresh troops to go to IRAQ. So the troops that are in Iraq NOW will NOT have their tours reduced from 15 months to 12 months. It is another scheme by the Bush administration to pull the wool over the eyes of the American public and at the same time give the shaft to the men and women who are currently in Iraq.

The shelf life of the Petraeus/Crocker hearing was well within the 24-hour news cycle. It died overnight and so did any hopes for ending this debacle in Iraq.

I blame the mainstream media in the United States as much as I blame the Bush administration. The mainstream media have become willing partners in this endless war and nobody cares.

Editorial comment by BILL CORCORAN, editor of CORKSPHERE.

Petraeus's Betrayal

By Robert Scheer, Truthdig
Posted on April 9, 2008, Printed on April 9, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/81913/

General Betray Us? Of course he has. MoveOn.org can hardly be expected to recycle its slogan from last September, when Gen. David Petraeus testified in support of escalating the U.S. war in Iraq, given the hysterical denunciations that worthy group received at the time. But it was right then -- as it would be to repeat the charge now.

By undercutting the widespread support for getting out of Iraq, Petraeus did indeed betray the American public, siding with an enormously unpopular president who wants to stay the course in Iraq for personal and political reasons that run contrary to genuine national security interests. Once again, the president is passing the buck to the uniformed military to justify continuing a ludicrous imperial adventure, and the good general has dutifully performed.

So why are we surprised? Why do we expect the generals to lead us on the path to peace when that is the professional task of statesmen and not warriors? It is an abdication of civilian control of the military, the basic principle of American constitutional governance, to assign a central role to an active-duty general to make the decision to end the war. It betrays the legacy warnings of our two most famous wartime generals, George Washington and Dwight D. Eisenhower.

American history offers no greater heroes, not because of their considerable success in battle but because they gained the wisdom to sound the alarm against unbridled militarism so passionately and effectively. The farewell addresses of both those departing generals-turned-presidents still stand as the essential bookends for what has been written about the limits on military adventure required for democracy's survival. Washington's plea to the nation "to moderate the fury of party spirit, to warn against the mischiefs of foreign intrigue, to guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism" sets the standard for enlightened political discourse.

A close second is Eisenhower's warning, "In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex."

We have had many other examples of retired military officers asserting the need for informed and rational public decision-making as to matters of war and peace. Republican presidential candidate John McCain was one of those voices when, as a senator, he led the fight, along with fellow Vietnam War veteran John Kerry, to normalize relations with the same Communist leadership in Hanoi that had once been our enemy. Does anyone, McCain included, now think we were wrong to bring the troops home from Vietnam -- and just why are the dire consequences that McCain now predicts for a withdrawal from Iraq any more plausible?

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