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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: stockman_scott who wrote (31095)	11/6/2003 10:12:53 AM
From: T L Comiskey	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 89467

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.... Editorial: Mounting losses / It's time for Bush to map an exit from Iraq Wednesday, November 05, 2003 The especially cruel loss Sunday of 16 American soldiers on their way to a break from their service in Iraq was a more shocking example of the general bad news coming from the war there. That bad news raises a more profound question for Americans -- and one that is made no easier to resolve by the heightened politicization of the subject by the presidential campaign. The question is, how much blood and gold is the United States prepared to spend to pursue the postwar occupation and presumed rebuilding of Iraq? The short answer on the gold is the vote of Congress last week to put forward another $87.5 billion in deficit spending -- that is to say, money that the U.S. government will have to borrow -- to fund the efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. One has to assume that Congress wouldn't vote the way it did unless its members believed the American people support that expenditure of public money. The answer on the loss of American life in Iraq gets harder by the day. The U.S. armed forces have lost 360 members since the war started March 19, including 222 -- nearly two-thirds and more than one a day -- since President Bush declared May 1 that major combat operations were ended. One can argue that our military is a volunteer force, that its members are just doing their jobs and even -- if one believes the Iraq war to be worthwhile -- that they are doing necessary work for our country. At the same time, in terms of both human and financial costs, the Post-Gazette believes that it's now past time for the administration to develop a timetable for bringing this affair to an end. It is hard to imagine that the American people will tolerate the idea of U.S. troops in Iraq until 2013 and costs of at least $200 billion, two of the current projections. What needs to be done is for the administration to put on the table a plan for turning responsibility for Iraq over to international authority -- the United Nations or a regional body -- as soon as possible, accompanied by a schedule to return governance of Iraq to Iraqis as soon as possible. If the United Nations won't accept responsibility for Iraq without being given authority, then the White House must begin the transition to handing over authority. If the rest of the world doesn't want to pick up responsibility for rebuilding the war-torn country while American companies enjoy all the big contracts, then the Bush administration should be willing to break the hearts of Halliburton, Bechtel, J.P. Morgan Chase and other recipients by sharing the largesse. There's another barrier to setting a timetable for getting America out of this mess. The Bush administration seems to believe that to do so is to admit that it made a mistake in getting the United States into Iraq in the first place, and that it would thus risk paying a price at the ballot box for a change of course. In that political context, it is worth recalling another president from Texas, this time a Democrat named Lyndon Johnson, who, faced with mounting opposition to the Vietnam War, decided not to seek re-election in 1968 so that he could concentrate on finding peace in Southeast Asia. Pride and politics are no good reasons for the United States to resist taking the appropriate steps to map out and present the endgame for the Iraq war and occupation, and in the process, set an end date to the painful flow of lives and money that, by the day, Americans find more difficult to justify.