Getting Out Of Iraq

I have long resisted the idea that the US should pull out of Iraq. But it has been a conditional opposition. My opinion has been that we should never have gone into Iraq to begin with, but having done so we have an obligation to the Iraqi people to help clean up the mess that we helped create. But if we ever get to the point where we are no longer helping, but are perhaps making things worse, then we should go.

For a long time during the occupation, war supporters could point to lots of news that wasn't necessarily covered well by the MSM, but which suggested that things weren't as bad as they seemed and that things might be going the right direction. Bloggers like Instapundit regularly linked to posts about under-reported good news in Iraq. Those posts have long since disappeared. War supporters have gotten to the point where the only argument they can come up with for continuing the efforts and the death over there is that Americans don't surrender, the stoic idea that we just have to stay the course because we just can't give in.

The greatest shame of Vietnam was not that we went there to begin with, though that was a pretty bad call, but that two American presidents continued waging a war they knew they would not win simply because they were too prideful to admit defeat. How many Americans and Vietnamese died over the years because Johnson just couldn't bring himself to admit publicly he had made a mistake? How many died because Nixon insisted on holding out until he could extricate the military without admitting failure?

The arguments then and now for continuing the war seem eerily similar. The current president has proven himself over and over incapable of admitting error. That Rumsfeld managed to last as long as he did in the Pentagon is proof of that. Commending the infamous Mike Brown for doing a heckuva job, while the complaints and realization of incompetence were already rising proves it again. And the list goes on.

The situation in Iraq has gotten to the point where we appear to no longer be doing anything to help. The president should have enough integrity to admit this and accept a withdrawal from a tragic situation largely of his own making. Withdrawing may or may not stop the suffering of the Iraqi people. But staying will certainly only make things worse and our soldiers will die for the pride of their commander-in-chief.