Ours. We broke it, we bought it. It’s still more broken than not, so it’s still ours. Sheesh. 
It’s more like Bush’s: “Fuck Saddam, we’re taking him out”
That evolved into official US policy over a period of months.
Great line from the McCain response:
“Timing is not as important as whether we leave with victory and honor…”
I get the feeling that if someone would just buy us a big engraved trophy that said “World’s Best Invasion” we could wrap this whole thing up in a few weeks.
“Dictate” is your term, not mine.
Now? It’s partly ours, as recognized by UNSC resolution 1790. After December, it’s a different matter. Maliki probably won’t request another extension, although I don’t know if that’s the only mechanism for extending the UNSC mandate.
Yeah, sure, the horse race isn’t official till its called, but the glaringly obvious remains obvious. It was glaringly obvious a year before the war started that it was going to happen, didn’t become “official” till the order was given. Don’t mean shit to a tree, now, does it? You are substituting formality for fact.
As I’ve said, looks to me like that Maliki’s Shia party and the Sadrist Shia party are getting married, a match brokered by al-Sistani. The Sadrist’s price? America go.
Frankly, I very much doubt Maliki wants any hurry here, the Americans are spending metric buttloads of money, and he is in a position to see to it that it finds its way to reliable, steady hands. Which is demonstrated by support for the Party that most embodies reliability and steadiness. Nobody butchers the cash cow.
Which indicates that what Maliki is negotiating is not so much whether or not we go, but how many yanks of the cash cow’s udder he can get in before we do, and how can he best ensure that American aid continues to be funneled into responsible and reliable pockets. And for as long as possible.
Now, I can’t conclusively prove this, this is interpretation. But then, so is yours.
Oh, its a negotiating ploy all right, but its the ploy whereby they tell us that we’re not negotiating what we think we’re negotiating. He’s not simply saying he isn’t going to buy the car, he’s saying if we don’t move it, he’ll have it towed.
What gets me is the whole “winning” argument is so arbitrary and so obviously false as to be downright ridiculous. Are we children? We can’t leave Iraq until we win? Win what? What precisely has to occur to precipitate our winning? It’s all a crock. This administration has no intention of taking its toys and going home after some nebulous set of circumstances coalesce into focus, because the honest answer is winning is the complete submission and acquiescence of the Iraqi people to US control of its oil and land for strategic purposes, and we certainly can’t do that if we leave, can we?
Now, with Maliki’s somewhat ambiguous endorsement of Obama’s plan, and last week’s insistance on a timeframe for troop withdrawal, the Bush administration, of which McCain is an extension, is in the unenviable position of being forced into changing its plans.
The Republicans are just now seeing the political writing on the wall. An Obama victory in November is becoming conceivable to them and they don’t want to be on the wrong side of history, hence Bush’s new, yet weaselly entertainment of redeployment timeframe talks by calling it a “general time horizon.”
It’s become crystal clear that the world wants us out of Iraq poste-haste, so what’s a war-mongering regime, with possible future war-crimes prosecutions, like the Bush administration to do, other than abandon its colonialist aspirations and work toward convincing the world, through acts during its final months at the helm, that it was their idea all along to leave but, unlike the Democrats, theirs was a plan of prudence which, as we all obviously see, worked out in the end?
…that is unless the Bush administration gets the gift of another terrorist attack (or credible threat) on US soil. Then all bets are off, McCain sails to an easy victory in November, and the Neocons, laden with new-found power, promote such a clamping down of individual rights and freedoms in the US that a visitor would be convinced he’d stepped into Soviet era Russia.
I think perhaps the argument that we must stay until we undefinably win in Iraq stems from fear. Once we get out, whether it’s in 16 months or 16 years, the judgement of history comes due. If we don’t achieve a shining beacon of freedom in the middle east, the destruction of al Qaeda, or at least gas at 67.9 cents a gallon, people are going to seriously wonder what the Republicans spent our nation’s riches on. Absent something really really good, history will not be kind.
Since nothing spectacularly wonderful has happened yet, the only option is to drag the war out; dotting i’s and crossing t’s, hoping for a miracle, and praying that the blame for failure will never come home to roost.
McCain indicates U.S. troops could withdraw in 2 years
-Acquiescence to the reality of inevitable victory, within two years.
I don’t think McCain would hold to that for a moment if he actually became president. The downside of an Iraq without US control is just too big for him.
Might McCain pull out of Iraq faster than Obama?
Of course, this ‘apirational hope’ is entirely dependent upon future corner turnings within Iraq itself.
I wouldn’t usually define a ‘guest’ as someone who smashed the door in, ran through the house firing a fully automatic weapon from the hip until he found and killed the abusive father in the attic, then set the living-room furniture on fire and settled down to watch TV while the kids started stabbing each other in the kitchen. And even if I did, I would probably categorise them as the kind of ‘guest’ who wouldn’t leave nicely when asked.
Invading a country =/= being a house guest. One of the perks of being a successful invading nation is leaving on your own terms, it’s also usually how you tell if you were in fact successful.
That’s all true, but we’re supposed to be pretending that we were invited guests now and that the victims of the home invasion are our really good friends. If we’re going to keep up that pretense, then we can’t demand that they negotiate terms for us to leave.