To: Sully- who wrote (50809 ) 9/15/2006 1:48:26 AM From: tejek Respond to Bush campaign is simply offensive Spare us another White House campaign to convince the American people that it's absolutely necessary to continue the same effort in Iraq. If I'm counting right, this is the fourth time in the past 12 months that President Bush has embarked on this type of campaign. The situation has deteriorated so badly in Iraq -- and the American people know it -- that rhetoric will not make a difference. The only way Bush is going to get attention, let alone support, starts with firing his existing national security team, replacing it with a bipartisan team and finding a different strategy in Iraq. Rather than making another series of speeches about why a precipitous withdrawal from Iraq is not in the United States' interests, Bush must finally get rid of his failed wartime secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, and bring in someone such as former Georgia Democratic Sen. Sam Nunn, who commands the respect of the military and Republicans and Democrats. Two Persian Gulf specialists, Kenneth Pollack and Daniel Byman, suggested recently that a civil war in Iraq was all but a reality now and that U.S. policy has to be restructured to minimize its negative consequences. That might even mean a greater American troop presence in the region, a major effort to deal with a mass of refugees (often a byproduct of a civil war), major diplomatic and even military actions to prevent a civil war from spreading to the whole region, and plans to prevent Iraq from becoming a terrorist stronghold the way Afghanistan did under the Taliban. More Iraqis died in fighting during the past month than Lebanese and Israelis did in the Hezbollah conflict. My instinct is that he's going to that well once too often. It won't work. sltrib.com
