Two Republican Senators have decided enough is enough and have said publicly that they want President Bush to lower the number of troops that we have in Iraq. Frankly, I’m wondering what took them so long. The war has been over for years. The government is just unwilling to accept it. You can’t fight a war when your people are against it. It just doesn’t work. I can say with conviction, that had the American People been behind this war, and if they thought that American interests were really at stake here, we wouldn’t be where we are now.
This President, in fact everyone in this government except for a gallant few, must realize that they can’t get away with doing things that the people don’t want done. I don’t care what it is, unless the American people are behind it, nothing works. This goes for the War on Terrorism, The War on Drugs and anything else that the government unilaterally declares war on. You just can’t win a war without public support.
It seems that the only thing that this war has achieved for the people in this country is the realization that our government is not working in our best interests. The interests that this government is working for are its own best interests. Saying this, I’m including the Democrats. The Congress could have started an investigation of this war the day that the Democratic majority took their seats in Washington. If this had happened, with the mandate that the American people had given them, we would probably be near the final phase of drawing up the impeachment papers for both George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Instead of doing this, the Democratic Congress chose to play political games while our soldiers die in the field. Does Congress understand why they have such a low approval rating?
Why does it take two Republican Senators to send a message to the White House that effectively says that this war is over? This should have been the first piece of business on the Democratic Agenda. The Democrats don’t want the war to end. The reason why the Democrats don’t want the war to end is because they figure if the war ends, the 2008 elections will be based on their job performance and not on the people’s dissatisfaction with the Republican Administration. It’s as simple as that. The Democrats would rather be playing politics than doing what the people wanted them to do! Let them be the ones that have to explain why they didn’t end this war to a family that has lost a son or a daughter to this war.
The people that defend the Democrats say that the Democrats don’t have the majority that they need to end this war. That might be true today, but if Congress would have started an investigation into the lies and deceit that brought us this war in the first place, who knows where we would be today? Instead we are celebrating the fact that not the Democrats, but the Republicans are putting the final nails in the coffin of this war! Congress should be ashamed of itself!
Isn’t it strange how everyone fighting in Iraq has turned into Al Qaeda in the last month or so? Just last month the military estimated that there were only about 5,000 Al Qaeda personnel in Iraq, and now, everyone that takes a shot at an American soldier has magically been turned into an Al Qaeda terrorist instead of an insurgent. I find this a little hard to swallow. I also find it a little hard to swallow when I read news reports that say Al Qaeda was responsible for bombing that Bagdad Hotel in which Aziz al-Yasiri, a vocal critic of President Nouri al-Maliki, died when the supposed “Al Qaeda” blew himself up right next to him. The reason I have a hard time believing all of this, is that Mr. Aziz al-Yasiri was just on television saying that Maliki’s government should step down. I don’t think that Al Qaeda would go out of its way to kill a Sunni that wanted to topple the US lead government. Just a thought, but like everything else in this war and in the political comings and goings in Iraq and this country, you can’t believe a thing anyone says.
That doesn’t say much for our political system. It should now be apparent to just about everyone that our political system needs an overhaul from the ground up. Maybe a new Constitutional Convention is in order here, because all I see are corporate hacks running for office save a very few. Nobody seems to be representing the people in this country. Unless Mike Gravel or Dennis Kucinich or Ron Paul come up with thirty million dollars real soon, all we are going to get after the next Presidential race (If we even have one) is just more of the same corporate puppets. Think about it, I have. Something needs to give in this country, and from a historical perspective, it isn’t going to be the American people. I hope.
