For anyone who might be interested in what Iraqis think of the CYA proposals made by a bunch of American political hacks.
http://twentyfourstepstoliberty.blogspot.com/Wednesday, December 06, 2006
Baker-Hamilton Report, Deja Vou!
It doesn’t seem that the report is bringing anything new to us.
Although I haven’t been able to read the whole report yet, but I read the Executive Summary and have been following the notes that were leaked from the report before. It basically doesn’t invent any solutions. It only speaks loud what the Iraqis have been saying for years now, which is to return those who were dismissed from their jobs in the name of debaathification, release the prisoners who’ve been in jail for a long time for no legal reasons, rid the country from the militias that are killing thousands of Iraqis a month and improve the security forces and include Iraq’s neighboring countries in the talks, and other issues. The report just put these issues in one document and in an organized order.
The report and what it seems to suggest is very far from solving any problems in Iraq. It was a report written in the name of Iraq, but really was intended to address the average American.
To answer to the increasing demand to pull out of Iraq and bring the U.S. troops back, the Baker-Hamilton group worked and advertised for their attempts to calm the American public.
If we go back to what Bush said in his speech after he received the report today, we’ll find that he rarely mentioned Iraq in what he said. All what he wanted to emphasize on was that the congress should be working with the administration and that they both will find a way out.
The congress “won’t agree on every proposal and we probably won’t agree on every proposal. Nevertheless, it is an opportunity to come together, to work together on this important issue.”
What does this have to do with preventing 100 killings in Iraq today?
“The country is tired of pure political bickering that happens in Washington. But this report will give us all an opportunity to find common ground for the good of the country. Not for the good of the Republican party or the Democrat party.”
WHAT?
What country? I must be confused. I remember there were more than 3000 people killed in October. Was that in Iraq or America? Because from what Bush is saying, it looks like it happened in the U.S.!
I thought the report was to suggest solutions to stabilize Iraq and save the Iraqis from the mass massacre they’ve been living in for more than three years.
“The United States must not make an open-ended commitment to keep large numbers of American troops deployed in Iraq.”
But that’s not what the administration has been saying for four years now, even before the invasion. It was always promised that the U.S. will be in Iraq as long as it is needed.
I don’t get it. If the report believes that staying in Iraq is not needed now, it means that the Americans have never come to help the Iraqis. Because if scores of Iraqis are being killed every day in a brutal civil war and that doesn’t make the States committed to help Iraq, it means they only wanted to topple Saddam Hussein, which they did, and now its time to go home.
What shocked me the most in the repot is the way it urges the American administration to punish the Iraqis for what the United States and the Iraqi governments
messed up and failed to solve.
“If the Iraqi government does not make substantial progress toward the achievement of milestones on national reconciliation, security and governance, the United States should reduce its political, military, or economic support for the Iraqi government,” the Iraq Study Group suggested!
And we all should know what that means. It is a Deja vou. It is what America did after Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990. To punish Saddam Hussein, the United States isolated the Iraqis from the rest of the world and starved them to death.
Is that the way American politicians solve problems? Just isolate Iraq again and cut the news from that part of the world and protect the Americans from hearing the horrible stories from their, we’ll be fine?
It worked before. 12 years of sanctions and more than 500,000 Iraqi children died and millions of Iraqis fled the country. Thousands died because they didn’t have money to buy medications or because there were no medications in hospitals. The education system went from one of the best in the Middle East down to NOTHING. The government was paralyzed and had no services to offer to its people.
Yes, that was under the name of punishing Saddam Hussein’s government. That was a real success!