RogerGathman

I support immediate pullout - and supported it in 2003. I don't think it is going to happen, however.

So, between the optimum of pullout and the possible - influencing Bush's nutty policy in Iraq over the next two years - it seems to me that the best thing Americans can do is to urge real reconciliation - talks between all parties, including Al Qaeda, with a heavy emphasis on self policing. That grants a de facto political authority to various factions, but that authority is there whether it is recognized or not. The self-policing is a first step, needed to stop criminal gangs and warfare for the hell of it.

The next thing is to ask the Iraqis to train the Americans... Actually, if the Americans really were going to stay in Iraq for the next five years or so, than Iraqis should train Americans how to. But I don't see that as really happening. However, Iraqi soldiers and police should train themselves. The country has been around long enough to secure itself, develop its own police force and army, etc. Those forces need to learn a lot about policing, securing and human rights. But they don't need Americans training them. Besides which, the American training has been mostly pointless. This way of impressing American influence on a country - which worked for a while in South America - isn't working.

The most important thing for Iraqis is being able to live semi-normal lives again. More important than anything else at the moment.

An excellent question. However, responses here and elsewhere suggest that our national responsibilities can be reduced to a decision whether to keep troops in Iraq and if so, how many for how long. That's ducking the larger moral issue. Our continued military involvement is an important and urgent policy debate. But it does not equate to our moral burden in this fiasco and or substitute for a more constructive and engaged policy toward the region over the longer term. Whatever the military and political outcome of the current crisis, I'd like to hear some proposals for how we can redeem ourselves, if that's the right expression, perhaps with some far-sighted mechanisms for stabilizing the ethnic and political conflicts, trade preferences, or other bi-lateral, mutli-lateral, trans-national initiatives that may have worked elsewhere in the world. Surely some ingenious proposals along these lines could help salvage this catastrophe or maybe mitigate its worst consequences. It's probably asking too much for official Washington to be looking at such things right now, but surely we need not be bound by their myopia.

"Our" response to the Iraqi people should be:

1- We supported and financed and covered-up for Saddam Hussein as he massacred you bunches at a time and fought a war against his neighbor (and we probably encouraged him to attack Kuwait too - Remember how Ambassador Glaspie told Saddam that the US has "no opinion" on the matter?)

2- We encouraged you Iraqi Shiites to rise up against Saddam, and then we abandoned you (but we made a Hollywood movie about it starring George Clooney)

3- We imposed years of sanctions on you that resulted in the deaths of over 300,000 children, and our Secretary of State Madam Albright declared openly that your children's deaths were "Worth It".

4- We attacked and massacred your retreating troops and spent days bombing civilian infrastructure such as roads, bridges and even water treatment facilities, resulting in God knows how many dead because as our Colin Powel stated, "We don't do body counts."

5- Since then we have killed another 600,000 civilians thus far, and have covered your country with depleted uranium which will be there to take care of your future generations too.

6- We have destroyed your country, your culture, your museums, your economic infrastructure, your government, your culture, etc etc

Why? Because we really don't give a damn about Iraqis, and never have.

So put the hypocritical "What will we tell the Iraqis" nonsense aside because its a little too late for that. Nobody is buying it, least of all the Iraqis.

Yes, "we" are responsible and the fact that others may have also been responsible does not detract in the LEAST from our responsibility. Here, read this and remember just some of what we've done to the Iraqis - the same ones that "we" are shedding crocodile tears over now:

America didn't seem to mind poison gas Joost R. Hiltermann International Herald Tribune Friday, January 17, 2003

AMMAN, Jordan In calling for regime change in Iraq, George W. Bush has
accused Saddam Hussein of being a man who gassed his own people. Bush
is right, of course. The public record shows that Saddam's regime
repeatedly spread poisonous gases on Kurdish villages in 1987 and 1988
in an attempt to put down a persistent rebellion.
...
Analysis of thousands of captured Iraqi secret police documents and
declassified U.S. government documents, as well as interviews with
scores of Kurdish survivors, senior Iraqi defectors and retired U.S.
intelligence officers, show (1) that Iraq carried out the attack on
Halabja, and (2) that the United States, fully aware it was Iraq,
accused Iran, Iraq's enemy in a fierce war, of being partly
responsible for the attack. The State Department instructed its
diplomats to say that Iran was partly to blame. The result of this
stunning act of sophistry was that the international community failed
to muster the will to condemn Iraq strongly for an act as heinous as
the terrorist strike on the World Trade Center. ..

Now lets see you wiggle out of responsibility.