Cut and Run, the Only Brave Thing to Do

Society Pakistan & World Affairs
1

some do have a heart. media needs one badly.

this might be a drop in the bucket, but a drop it is!
any comments

dushi

Cut and Run, the Only Brave Thing to Do
Sunday, November 26th, 2006

Friends,
Tomorrow marks the day that we will have been in Iraq longer than we were in all of World War II.
That’s right. We were able to defeat all of Nazi Germany, Mussolini, and the entire Japanese empire in LESS time than it’s taken the world’s only superpower to secure the road from the airport to downtown Baghdad.
And we haven’t even done THAT. After 1,347 days, in the same time it took us to took us to sweep across North Africa, storm the beaches of Italy, conquer the South Pacific, and liberate all of Western Europe, we cannot, after over 3 and 1/2 years, even take over a single highway and protect ourselves from a homemade device of two tin cans placed in a pothole. No wonder the cab fare from the airport into Baghdad is now running around $35,000 for the 25-minute ride. And that doesn’t even include a friggin’ helmet.
Is this utter failure the fault of our troops? Hardly. That’s because no amount of troops or choppers or democracy shot out of the barrel of a gun is ever going to “win” the war in Iraq. It is a lost war, lost because it never had a right to be won, lost because it was started by men who have never been to war, men who hide behind others sent to fight and die.
Let’s listen to what the Iraqi people are saying, according to a recent poll conducted by the University of Maryland:
** 71% of all Iraqis now want the U.S. out of Iraq.
** 61% of all Iraqis SUPPORT insurgent attacks on U.S. troops.
Yes, the vast majority of Iraqi citizens believe that our soldiers should be killed and maimed! So what the hell are we still doing there? Talk about not getting the hint.
There are many ways to liberate a country. Usually the residents of that country rise up and liberate themselves. That’s how we did it. You can also do it through nonviolent, mass civil disobedience. That’s how India did it. You can get the world to boycott a regime until they are so ostracized they capitulate. That’s how South Africa did it. Or you can just wait them out and, sooner or later, the king’s legions simply leave (sometimes just because they’re too cold). That’s how Canada did it.
The one way that DOESN’T work is to invade a country and tell the people, “We are here to liberate you!” – when they have done NOTHING to liberate themselves. Where were all the suicide bombers when Saddam was oppressing them? Where were the insurgents planting bombs along the roadside as the evildoer Saddam’s convoy passed them by? I guess ol’ Saddam was a cruel despot – but not cruel enough for thousands to risk their necks. “Oh no, Mike, they couldn’t do that! Saddam would have had them killed!” Really? You don’t think King George had any of the colonial insurgents killed? You don’t think Patrick Henry or Tom Paine were afraid? That didn’t stop them. When tens of thousands aren’t willing to shed their own blood to remove a dictator, that should be the first clue that they aren’t going to be willing participants when you decide you’re going to do the liberating for them.
A country can HELP another people overthrow a tyrant (that’s what the French did for us in our revolution), but after you help them, you leave. Immediately. The French didn’t stay and tell us how to set up our government. They didn’t say, “we’re not leaving because we want your natural resources.” They left us to our own devices and it took us six years before we had an election. And then we had a bloody civil war. That’s what happens, and history is full of these examples. The French didn’t say, “Oh, we better stay in America, otherwise they’re going to kill each other over that slavery issue!”
The only way a war of liberation has a chance of succeeding is if the oppressed people being liberated have their own citizens behind them – and a group of Washingtons, Jeffersons, Franklins, Ghandis and Mandellas leading them. Where are these beacons of liberty in Iraq? This is a joke and it’s been a joke since the beginning. Yes, the joke’s been on us, but with 655,000 Iraqis now dead as a result of our invasion (source: Johns Hopkins University), I guess the cruel joke is on them. At least they’ve been liberated, permanently.
So I don’t want to hear another word about sending more troops (wake up, America, John McCain is bonkers), or “redeploying” them, or waiting four months to begin the “phase-out.” There is only one solution and it is this: Leave. Now. Start tonight. Get out of there as fast as we can. As much as people of good heart and conscience don’t want to believe this, as much as it kills us to accept defeat, there is nothing we can do to undo the damage we have done. What’s happened has happened. If you were to drive drunk down the road and you killed a child, there would be nothing you could do to bring that child back to life. If you invade and destroy a country, plunging it into a civil war, there isn’t much you can do 'til the smoke settles and blood is mopped up. Then maybe you can atone for the atrocity you have committed and help the living come back to a better life.
The Soviet Union got out of Afghanistan in 36 weeks. They did so and suffered hardly any losses as they left. They realized the mistake they had made and removed their troops. A civil war ensued. The bad guys won. Later, we overthrew the bad guys and everybody lived happily ever after. See! It all works out in the end!
The responsibility to end this war now falls upon the Democrats. Congress controls the purse strings and the Constitution says only Congress can declare war. Mr. Reid and Ms. Pelosi now hold the power to put an end to this madness. Failure to do so will bring the wrath of the voters. We aren’t kidding around, Democrats, and if you don’t believe us, just go ahead and continue this war another month. We will fight you harder than we did the Republicans. The opening page of my website has a photo of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, each made up by a collage of photos of the American soldiers who have died in Bush’s War. But it is now about to become the Bush/Democratic Party War unless swift action is taken.
This is what we demand:

  1. Bring the troops home now. Not six months from now. NOW. Quit looking for a way to win. We can’t win. We’ve lost. Sometimes you lose. This is one of those times. Be brave and admit it.
  2. Apologize to our soldiers and make amends. Tell them we are sorry they were used to fight a war that had NOTHING to do with our national security. We must commit to taking care of them so that they suffer as little as possible. The mentally and physically maimed must get the best care and significant financial compensation. The families of the deceased deserve the biggest apology and they must be taken care of for the rest of their lives.
  3. We must atone for the atrocity we have perpetuated on the people of Iraq. There are few evils worse than waging a war based on a lie, invading another country because you want what they have buried under the ground. Now many more will die. Their blood is on our hands, regardless for whom we voted. If you pay taxes, you have contributed to the three billion dollars a week now being spent to drive Iraq into the hellhole it’s become. When the civil war is over, we will have to help rebuild Iraq. We can receive no redemption until we have atoned.
    In closing, there is one final thing I know. We Americans are better than what has been done in our name. A majority of us were upset and angry after 9/11 and we lost our minds. We didn’t think straight and we never looked at a map. Because we are kept stupid through our pathetic education system and our lazy media, we knew nothing of history. We didn’t know that WE were the ones funding and arming Saddam for many years, including those when he massacred the Kurds. He was our guy. We didn’t know what a Sunni or a Shiite was, never even heard the words. Eighty percent of our young adults (according to National Geographic) were not able to find Iraq on the map. Our leaders played off our stupidity, manipulated us with lies, and scared us to death.
    But at our core we are a good people. We may be slow learners, but that “Mission Accomplished” banner struck us as odd, and soon we began to ask some questions. Then we began to get smart. By this past November 7th, we got mad and tried to right our wrongs. The majority now know the truth. The majority now feel a deep sadness and guilt and a hope that somehow we can make make it all right again.
    Unfortunately, we can’t. So we will accept the consequences of our actions and do our best to be there should the Iraqi people ever dare to seek our help in the future. We ask for their forgiveness.
    We demand the Democrats listen to us and get out of Iraq now.
    Yours,
    Michael Moore
    www.michaelmoore.com
    [email protected]
2

Re: Cut and Run, the Only Brave Thing to Do

How can they just leave? The govt made this mess, now they have to set things right before they go... They owe it to the Iraqi people.

3

Re: Cut and Run, the Only Brave Thing to Do

americans should get out, iraq is well and truly liberated. perhaps the oic should consider a true peacekeeping force.

heres irans view

Iran: US exit key to Iraq peace

US troops must leave Iraq if security is to be restored, Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has said during talks with the Iraqi president.

He said the US was powerless to stop the unrest in Iraq, which was also bad for other countries in the region.
Iraqi President Jalal Talabani in turn called on Iran to stop backing Shia militias and support Iraq’s government instead, Iraq’s foreign minister said.
US President George W Bush has again ruled out removing US troops from Iraq. “I am not going to pull our troops off the battlefield before the mission is complete,” he told an audience in Latvia, where he is attending a Nato summit.

He earlier dismissed suggestions that the violence in Iraq amounted to a civil war, saying it was product of al-Qaeda’s strategy to ignite sectarian strife in the country.
He also said the US would only open a dialogue with Iran if it showed it had suspended a uranium enrichment programme which can be used in weapons production.
While Washington may find it awkward seeing Iran as a growing powerbroker in Iraq, correspondents say, direct talks between Iran and Iraq to resolve the crisis may to some extent let the Bush administration off the hook.
‘US must leave’
Ayatollah Khamenei said the US would not succeed in its aims in Iraq.
“The occupation of Iraq is not a morsel that the US can swallow,” he said.
He said the US must leave Iraq if security is to be restored.
“The first step to resolve the instability in Iraq is the withdrawal of occupiers from this country and the transfer of security responsibilities to the popular Iraqi government,” he reportedly said.
If asked by the Iraqi government, he said, Iran “won’t spare any effort to contribute to stability and security in Iraq”.
According to Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, President Talabani had urged his Iranian hosts to divert their aid to the government in Baghdad rather than to diverse groups, including Shia militias.
Mr Zebari told the BBC the Iraqi government message had been that the stakes were too high and Iran should do more to ensure the current administration did not fail.
He also said he detected some willingness on the part of the Iranians to address the issue of direct talks with the US over Iraq.
On Monday, Mr Talabani held talks with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who said Iran was ready to do whatever it could to help Iraq. Last year Mr Talabani, a Farsi speaker, became the first Iraqi head of state to visit Tehran in almost four decades.

4

Re: Cut and Run, the Only Brave Thing to Do

Dush, you are right. This is a very nice effort by Michael Moore.
Infact, he has done a lot of work.
But the problem with him is that sometimes he goes too far (not in this article though) - and that affects his credibility.

5

Re: Cut and Run, the Only Brave Thing to Do

WW2 was a conventional war where the americans overwhelmed the japs and germans by sheer weight of numbers ...it is stupid to compare it to a situation like Iraq

6

Re: Cut and Run, the Only Brave Thing to Do

How.? r they freedom fighters using nuclear, biological or chemical weapons.? doesn't the American outweighs the freedom fighter by sheer number..? they say there are just adoun 10 - 20k freedom fighters. and about 140+k american soldiers.?

7

Re: Cut and Run, the Only Brave Thing to Do

i agree.

no comparison with the hard bigot out there, though.

8

Re: Cut and Run, the Only Brave Thing to Do

for a second i thought you wrote this…dont take it as an insult…im gonna print this article and redistribute it at my school and masjid hopefully changing a lot of people’s opinions:wink:

9

Re: Cut and Run, the Only Brave Thing to Do

Right on the mark.... Before it was said, amreekan kutay ki moat aati hey tho vietnam ki taraf baghtha haey... Please substitue vietnam with NoKo or Eyraq as you deem fit. sala amreekan MC terrorist should comprehend the following.

Let's listen to what the Iraqi people are saying, according to a recent poll conducted by the University of Maryland:
** 71% of all Iraqis now want the U.S. out of Iraq.
** 61% of all Iraqis SUPPORT insurgent attacks on U.S. troops.

Defeat in the desert

By Dominic Johnson and Dominic Tierney

In January 1968, Americans turned on their televisions to find scenes of chaos and carnage as Vietnamese Communists unleashed their surprise Tet offensive. It would go down in history as the greatest American battlefield defeat of the Cold War.

In December 1992, 25 years later, the United States began a humanitarian intervention in Somalia that would be viewed as the most striking failure of the post-Cold War era.

Then, in March 2003, American tanks charged across the dunes of Kuwait and into Iraq, beginning what would become, in the eyes of many Americans, the worst foreign-policy debacle of the post-9/11 world. Tet, Somalia and Iraq: the three great post-World War II American defeats. Except that, remarkably, Tet and Somalia were not defeats. They were successes perceived as failures.

Such stark divergence between perception and reality is common in wartime, when people's beliefs about which side wins and which loses are often driven by psychological factors that have nothing to do with events on the battlefield. Tet and Somalia may, therefore, hold important lessons for Iraq. Most Americans saw the Tet offensive as a failure for the United States. Approval of President Lyndon B. Johnson's handling of the war slipped to a low of 26 per cent. Before Tet, 58 percent of Americans had described themselves as 'hawks' who wanted to step up American military involvement in the war, while 26 per cent had described themselves as 'doves' seeking to reduce it. Two months after Tet, however, doves narrowly outnumbered hawks.

How did perceptions become so detached from reality? A key factor was overblown expectations. In the months before Tet, Johnson had begun a 'progress campaign' to convince Americans that victory in Vietnam was right around the corner.

Reams of statistics showed that infiltration rates were down and enemy casualties were up. And it worked -- public confidence ticked upward.

But after Johnson's bullish rhetoric, Tet looked like a disaster. The scale and surprise of the offensive sent a shock wave through the American psyche.

As Johnson's former aide, Robert Koner, later recalled, "Boom, 40 towns get attacked, and they didn't believe us anymore." The illusion of defeat was heightened by two powerful symbolic events. First, the Communists attacked the American Embassy in Saigon. It was one of the smallest-scale actions of the Tet offensive, but it captured America's attention. The attackers had breached the pre-eminent symbol of the United States presence in South Vietnam: If the embassy wasn't safe, nowhere was safe. News outlets reported that the embassy had been captured, when in reality all of the attackers were soon lying dead in the courtyard.

General William Westmoreland, the commander of the American forces in Vietnam, held a press conference at the embassy to announce that Tet was an American victory. But behind the general dead Vietcong were still being dragged away from the blood-spattered lawn. Reporters could scarcely believe what they were hearing. "Westmoreland was standing in the ruins and saying everything was great," one said.

Second, Eddie Adams' photograph of South Vietnam's police chief executing a Vietcong captive in the street caused a sensation. After he fired the shot, the police chief told nearby reporters: "They killed many Americans and many of my men. Buddha will understand. Do you?" Back home in the United States, the image spoke powerfully of a brutal and unjust war. For some Americans this image was the Tet offensive.

Finally, the American news media painted a picture of disaster in Vietnam. Even though Communist forces incurred enormous losses, reporters often lauded their performance. As the New York Times war correspondent Peter Braestrup put it, "To have portrayed such a setback for one side as a defeat for the other - in a major crisis abroad -- cannot be counted as a triumph for American journalism." A similar story later unfolded in Somalia. From 1992 to 1994 the American humanitarian intervention in Somalia saved the lives of more than 100,000 Somalis and cut the number of refugees in half, at the cost of 43 American lives.

Back in the United States, however, this noble mission was widely viewed as the greatest foreign-policy disaster since Vietnam. By October 1993 approval for President Bill Clinton's handling of Somalia had fallen to 30 per cent. Only 25 per cent of Americans viewed the intervention as a success, and 66 per cent saw it as a failure. Like Tet, the mission in Somalia suffered from overblown expectations. Intervening in an anarchic, war-ridden country was bound to be difficult. But early efforts to provide food and security in Somalia went so well that the project looked deceptively easy.

The American public and news media lost interest -- until early October 1993, when American soldiers were killed in the infamous "Black Hawk Down" battle in Mogadishu.

With echoes of 1968 Saigon, powerful images of the Mogadishu battle pushed Americans toward a perception of defeat. Press coverage was dominated by pictures of the captured pilot, Michael Durant, and of mutilated American corpses, often with the tagline of America's 'humiliation.' Journalists tended to ignore the bigger picture, in this case large pro-American demonstrations in Somalia and successful efforts to save lives and restore order outside of the capital. Memories of Vietnam, and fears of getting bogged down in another messy quagmire, also promoted perceptions of failure.

In October 1993, 62 per cent of Americans thought that the intervention in Somalia "could turn into another Vietnam," even after Clinton announced that America was pulling soldiers out of Somalia, and at a time when American casualties were 1,000 times lower than in Vietnam. What does this mean for Iraq?

At the least, Tet and Somalia suggest we should be very careful before concluding that Iraq is a defeat. There is real evidence of failure, especially the escalating sectarian violence. But our perceptions are nevertheless easily manipulated.

Iraq looks like a defeat in part because the Bush administration fell into the same trap as the Johnson administration did, raising expectations of imminent victory by declaring, 'mission accomplished' before the real work had even begun. And, as with Somalia, fighting shadowy insurgents in Iraq while propping up a weak government engenders negative memories of Vietnam. Perceptions of success and failure can change the course of history. Reeling from the supposed disaster at Tet, the United States began to withdraw.

Memories of 'failure' in Somalia were a major reason, perhaps the major reason, that the United States did nothing to stop the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. If Iraq is perceived as a failure, it is only a matter of time before America pulls out, leaving who-knows-what behind. With the stakes so high, Americans must be certain that their perception of failure in Iraq is not a mirage.

10

Re: Cut and Run, the Only Brave Thing to Do

I like the article, more on the emotional side though but draws glaring conclusions.

11

Re: Cut and Run, the Only Brave Thing to Do

but, u will see that the same emotionality is wrenched into the americans when they are made anti-muslims through the endless FALSE PROPAGANDIZED news analysis.
media needs to be impartial, but some truths involve emotional affect.

12

Re: Cut and Run, the Only Brave Thing to Do

I have said it before and I'll say it again, US made a mistake by not handing over the Iraq to UN, US can still do it, but the problem resides in ego.

13

Re: Cut and Run, the Only Brave Thing to Do

Defeat in the desert sounds about right.

But Bush is no Nixon, so retreat will be rather messy and their will be no face savers for America.

14

Re: Cut and Run, the Only Brave Thing to Do

I think even if American decide to hand over Iraq to UN, no country in the world would like to send their soldiers in a mess they have created in Iraq.
No country would be stupid enough to see their soldiers get killed, only to save American soldiers’ lives.

Looking for Rishtas? Post here.
15

Re: Cut and Run, the Only Brave Thing to Do

How exactly could the UN have run it?

Do you really think that the Sunni Insurgents, Shia Death Squads, Kurdish Militants and Foreign Fighters are going to respect the UN which is an unarmed and illequped force?

These people dont even listen to their tribal and religious leaders, what makes you think if the UN passes a resolution that they will abide by it?

The best thing in Iraq is for Arab countries and Iran to help train the Iraqi forces while USA guards the borders of Iraq and slowly the Iraqi Military defeats the Death Squads and Insurgents and bring some stability to the country.

16

Re: Cut and Run, the Only Brave Thing to Do


UN forces are definitely less equipped in terms of 'arsenal/ammunition' but they will have much better 'political/moral' grounds in the sense that they will not be seen as 'occupying' forces. All the sectarian fightings we are seeing is because of foreign influences, Iran helping their factions while Saudis and other countries feeding their factions. Once UN steps in they will have better political say then they have now.

17

Re: Cut and Run, the Only Brave Thing to Do

I don't think this can be quelled by even putting right people in there now with short term strategies. Long term Iraq is lost and it will probably never retrun to its previous state ever. I cannot see any peaceful solution in near sight unless it lures the Iraqi people. You can't enforce security without giving the people something to chew on.

18

Re: Cut and Run, the Only Brave Thing to Do

^ it may very likely turn into Lebanon or Sudan or Afghanistan.... ruled in pockets by area war-lord.

19

Re: Cut and Run, the Only Brave Thing to Do

http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20061205/gates_iraq_061205/20061205?hub=World

** Gates says U.S. is not winning Iraq war ** except for some retards who live in lala land.

20

Re: Cut and Run, the Only Brave Thing to Do

I think it already has turned into that, just that the warlords have not struck any peace deals yet. They are still blood thirsty and not tired of fighting.