:: NEWS COCKTAIL aka BlahBlahBlog ::
"Everything is being compressed into tiny tablets. You take a little pill of news every day - 23 minutes - and that's supposed to be enough." -Walter Cronkite, RE TV news. The Web has changed that for many, however, and here is an extra dose for your daily news cocktail. This prescription tends to include surveillance and now war-related links, along with the occasional pop culture junk and whatever else seizes my attention as I scan online news sites.:: 12.07.2006 ::
:: "The Iraq Study Group: A Fatal Flaw" ::
A report from The Nation
Robert Dreyfuss
There's good news and bad news in the long-awaited report of the Iraq Study Group. Happily, it starts the United States down the path of withdrawal. Unhappily, its most basic premise--that the United States can somehow support the nonexistent Iraqi government and bolster its viciously sectarian armed forces--is fatally flawed.
Let's start with the good news. The ISG has delivered a stunning body blow to the White House. Stripped of its details, the ISG's message is that President Bush's Iraq policy is a complete failure that has brought Iraq and the Middle East to the brink of catastrophe. As a result, the United States must execute an about-face. Almost immediately, the United States must begin withdrawing virtually all of its combat forces from Iraq, a withdrawal that should be completed early in 2008. At the same time, it says, the United States will have to scramble to launch a diplomatic effort involving Iraq's neighbors--including Syria and Iran--the Arab League, the UN, the Organization of the Islamic Conference and other world powers to prevent Iraq from spiraling into chaos.
Further, says the ISG report--which was handed personally to Bush by Hamilton and his co-chair, former Secretary of State Jim Baker, Wednesday--the United States must renounce any idea of permanent bases in Iraq, "reject the notion that the United States seeks to control Iraq's oil" and urgently seek national reconciliation in Iraq. To that latter end, the ISG proposes that the United States "must also try to talk directly to Muqtada al-Sadr, to militia leaders, and to insurgent leaders"--in other words, instead of seeking to crush the Iraqi resistance and smash Sadr's Mahdi Army, it's time to talk to them. And to top it all off, the ISG proposes a vigorous effort to restart the Palestinian-Israeli peace process.
It's hard to imagine a more sweeping rebuke to the President's disastrously misguided Middle East policy. The report breathes not one word about "victory" in Iraq. Ever the master of understatement, Baker said that the idea of staying the course in Iraq "is no longer viable."
The Baker-Hamilton report instantly isolated President Bush against a snowballing consensus among the mainstream political establishment. In a collective I-told-you-so, Democrats mostly heaped praise on the ISG report. "If the president is serious about the need for change in Iraq, he will find Democrats ready to work with him in a bipartisan fashion to find a way to end the war as quickly as possible," said Nancy Pelosi, the incoming speaker of the House, who added that the ISG report echoed virtually all of the Democrats' main talking points on Iraq.
Read more here.
posted by me
:: 4:35:00 PM [+] ::
...
