There’s something else that I think we should do. We need to go to the international community, hat in hand as we acknowledge our terrible mistakes, and ask for their help. We need to offer them something, however, to make it worth their while. I believe that in return for actual armed troops on the ground fighting alongside of us to secure Iraq, we could offer foreign nations a piece of the rebuilding action. In other words, we could promise to “outsource” some of the reconstruction efforts to those nations so that they can financially benefit.

By the way, I wish I could do something about the 3,000 character limit. Eventually, I may switch to a more fully featured blog product.

And I very much doubt they care about coming away with anything that will help their people nearly as much as they care about maneuvering their countries into a more powerful position on the world stage. Given the track records of both nations, it seems likely they would abuse any such power and I don’t see how we can let them have it.

We can’t leave. Not yet. Maybe not even next year.

Bush screwed us. Iraq has become the future threat that it wasn’t when Bush and crew claimed it was before the invasion. Actually, that’s something we may now never be able to change or fend off.

But we have a moral obligation to try. We trashed the country. We opened them up for anybody else to come in and mop them up. We can’t leave them worse off then they were before we went in.

We also need to look at what we will do to ourselves if we just up and leave in the next year. We may not have a strong friend in Iraq if we stay and fight. Hell, we may not have a friend at all. But we will have an enemy nation if we leave them to fall apart and have Iran or others come in to “help them” and get them back on their feet.

The hard part will be facing the fact that we may have to do what should have been done years ago. What should have been done on day one of this massive cluster****. We have to send in more troops. We have to send in the numbers to give our guys the strength to make more areas stable. Right now, our troops are playing whack-a-mole.

They clear an area, leave, clear a few more areas and then find out that the first has gone to hell again. We need to be able to lock areas down and keep them that way.

It’s going to cost us in blood and lives. Because of that, we have to make it clear to the new Iraq gov that this comes with stips. They will start working harder to get set up because we will be gone on Jan. 1, 2010.

I could give you more, but I’ll go way over the 3000 character limit.

The really crap part of this is what we now have to look at as a “victory” here. If we do everything right from this day on, we MAY have a friend in Iraq. We MIGHT NOT be facing ten years down the road just a brand new Saddam that WE set up. We COULD BE making a safe zone for us and others in the Middle East in Iraq.

We’ll be sending men to their death in the hope that we might have a victory that may be worth the lives lost.

VS

We leave now. We leave and make sure that the lives lost and blood spilled was for nothing. We leave and the chaos overtakes Iraq. We leave and make the Middle East, if not the world itself, less safe for us and for others.

And maybe we spead up the time window for the next war we may have to get into over there.

Bush screwed us good. Now all we can do is try and take the least damaging path out of Iraq. I think this is the least damaging.

Ah, well, you’re a nice guy and I’m inclined to let it pass.

Yeah, we have definitely created the perception that we’re a loose cannon of a country, and North Korea and Iran may be trying to go nuclear in part to stave off what they believe to be the possibility of a U.S. invasion. And other nations are understandably reluctant to accept the edict that we may have nuclear weapons but they may not.

On the other hand, look at what Iran is doing: President Ahmadinejad is making every effort to shift the regional balance of power in Iran’s favor. There is a wealth of evidence that Iran is backing Hizbollah, and that Iran worked behind the scenes to trigger that group’s conflict with Israel earlier this year. Ahmadinejad has stated he wishes to push Israel, a key ally of ours, “into the sea.” He is backed by radical Islamic clerics, and I don’t think we could put past him the sharing of dangerous WMDs with terror groups.

When it comes to the U.S. and Iran, I clearly believe we’re the lesser of two evils. And while there may be some degree of hypocrisy in our foreign policy, I believe it may be a necessary hypocrisy. After all, I don’t think we can afford to engage in unilateral nuclear disarmament, nor do I believe that we can afford to tolerate a nuclear Iran merely to show that we’re not the pot calling the kettle black.

You know, I’m typing this, and I’m realizing that I’m sounding more and more like a Disney movie.

I like the sentiment you’ve expressed but I question just how realistic such a posture would be. For one thing, I believe Kim Jong-il and
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would have dangerous agendas regardless of how they were treated by the United States. Their ambitions are not solely a reaction to U.S. foreign policy.

Also, I’m curious: what do you believe we could offer to either leader that would encourage them to compromise? Asking either of them to give up their nuclear ambitions would be, I’m sure, a huge sacrifice in their minds. They’d need to believe they were gaining at least as much as they were giving up.

Moreover, can we trust either man? And would a purely diplomatic solution be enough to ensure our national security?

Back to you, Sean…

Bush has labeled North Lorea, Iran, and the ex-Iraq as being members of teh Axis of Evil. While hyperbolic statements like that are great for exciting the passions of the masses, it lumps together groups that have nothing in common other than “We don’t like them, they don’t like us.” It also paints the speaker into a corner by painting the individual being spoken of as some mustachio-twirling nogoodnik out of a Dudley Do-Right cartoon. Since the first step in diplomacy is communication, leaders need to learn to communicate with each other like civil beings, not kindergarteners with a scraped knee and an absonded kickball. No name-calling, no appealing to the emotions of your listeners, just the facts, ma’am. The best way to create a dialogue is presenting the appearance of being willing to listen. Listen to what the other people are saying, then consider your response before you give it.