The candidate I'm supporting for President, Bill Richardson, has argued persuasively in an Op Ed published in the Washington Post in September that the U.S. must exit Iraq now. Richardson wrote:
Those who think we need to keep troops in Iraq misunderstand the Middle East. I have met and negotiated successfully with many regional leaders, including Saddam Hussein. I am convinced that only a complete withdrawal can sufficiently shift the politics of Iraq and its neighbors to break the deadlock that has been killing so many people for so long.
Our troops have done everything they were asked to do with courage and professionalism, but they cannot win someone else's civil war. So long as American troops are in Iraq, reconciliation among Iraqi factions is postponed. Leaving forces there enables the Iraqis to delay taking the necessary steps to end the violence. And it prevents us from using diplomacy to bring in other nations to help stabilize and rebuild the country.
The presence of American forces in Iraq weakens us in the war against al-Qaeda. It endows the anti-American propaganda of those who portray us as occupiers plundering Iraq's oil and repressing Muslims. The day we leave, this myth collapses, and the Iraqis will drive foreign jihadists out of their country. Our departure would also enable us to focus on defeating the terrorists who attacked us on Sept. 11, those headquartered along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border -- not in Iraq.
Logistically, it would be possible to withdraw in six to eight months. We moved as many as 240,000 troops into and out of Iraq through Kuwait in as little as a three-month period during major troop rotations. After the Persian Gulf War, we redeployed nearly a half-million troops in a few months.
Richardson is not the only person with tremendous foreign policy experience counseling a complete and prompt withdrawal from Iraq. In July, Sandy Berger, Bill Clinton's national security adviser, and Bruce Riedel, a senior fellow on Middle East Studies at the Brookings Institute, wrote:
A clear US commitment to a complete, irreversible withdrawal from Iraq may now be the only way to develop a regional concert of powers that could work with Iraqis to try to stabilise the country and cauterise the conflict.
The continuing US and British occupation is a roadblock to that co-operation. The galvanising impact of a decision to depart unequivocally can be the last best chance at preventing the conflict from boiling over beyond Iraq to the whole region. How we design and implement our departure is our last significant remaining leverage.
What I find sad is that the leading Democratic candidates for President along with Joe Biden steadfastly refuse to call for an immediate withdrawal from Iraq, and are highly critical of Richardson's approach. They end up echoing arguments put forth by the Bush Administration against a complete and prompt withdrawal from Iraq. In the last Presidential debate, Clinton, Edwards and Obama refused to commit to ending the occupation of Iraq by 2013.
"If you haven't seen enough to know that we need to get all the troops out then you aren't watching the same war that I and the rest of America are seeing" was Richardson's response in a recent speech.
Richardson has heard the call of our soldiers to end the war now. He pledges to promptly bring ALL of our troops home. There are no conditions or excuses to keep residual forces stationed in Iraq for years to come with Richardson.
To read his plan for Iraq in detail visit www.getourtroopout.com
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
