{"id":1740,"date":"2005-08-19T23:40:13","date_gmt":"2005-08-20T03:40:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.test.bradblog.com\/?p=1740"},"modified":"2005-08-19T23:40:13","modified_gmt":"2005-08-20T03:40:13","slug":"wise-man-crushes-vicious-lie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/?p=1740","title":{"rendered":"Wise Man Crushes Vicious Lie"},"content":{"rendered":"

Guest blogged by Winter Patriot<\/a><\/i><\/p>\n

It’s always an extreme pleasure — and a severe challenge — to post an item based on a column by Robert Parry<\/a>. His excellent piece of August 17, 2005, is called Iraq & the Logic of Withdrawal<\/a>. It’s compelling reading, and it should be mandatory for all who say “we have to stay in Iraq until the Iraqis can provide their own security”.<\/p>\n

Washington’s conventional wisdom on the Iraq War is roughly divided into two camps: those who still think George W. Bush’s invasion was a good idea and want to \u201cstay the course\u201d \u2013 and those who opposed Bush on going to war but now say \u201cwe must get it right.\u201d<\/div>\n

I am not in either camp, as regular readers of this space probably know. And I’ve been saying at every opportunity. So it’s good to see that a very wise observer agrees with me. His take on the issue is a bit different than mine, but we reach the same conclusions. I find that comforting. It’s like a math problem — when you’ve solved it, you go back and check your work by doing the same problem in a different way. If you get the same answer the second time, you can be fairly sure that your answer is correct. <\/p>\n

Both sides \u2013 representing nearly the entire political spectrum in Washington \u2013 rule out a prompt U.S. military withdrawal because that supposedly would turn Iraq into a \u201cfailed state\u201d and a \u201cbreeding ground for Islamic terrorism.\u201d Therefore, the thinking goes, U.S. troops must remain while Iraq builds a democracy that can stop the extremists.<\/p>\n

But there is a case to be made for U.S. withdrawal as the best option for both resolving the conflict and neutralizing the foreign Islamic extremists in Iraq. A corollary of this thinking holds that the continued U.S. military presence does more harm than good.<\/p><\/div>\n

More harm than good to Iraq? Or to the USA? I would say “both!”<\/p>\n

The logic of withdrawal goes like this:<\/p>\n

First, a distinction must be made between the Sunni-led insurgency, which is fighting out of a sense of Iraqi nationalism and to protect the Sunni minority’s interests in Iraq, and the al-Qaeda-linked terrorist network of Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. It is engaged in a jihad to drive Americans and other Westerners out of the Middle East.<\/p>\n

While the interests of the Sunni-led insurgency and the Zarqawi-led terrorists may overlap under the present circumstances, that is primarily because an American force of 138,000 troops remains inside Iraq.<\/p><\/div>\n

And the rest of the column goes like this<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Guest blogged by Winter Patriot It’s always an extreme pleasure — and a severe challenge — to post an item based on a column by Robert Parry. His excellent piece of August 17, 2005, is called Iraq & the Logic of Withdrawal. It’s compelling reading, and it should be mandatory for all who say “we […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-1740","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","bb-type-bradblog"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1740","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1740"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1740\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1740"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1740"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1740"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcoauthors&post=1740"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}