Submitted by John, Nov 21, 2006 09:55

I love the neocon talking point that Dems have no plan for Iraq, as if that discussion isn't in the news daily. No, the Dems do not have a plan that can be faxed in one short paragraph at an eigth grade reading level to Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and other extra-governmental mouthpieces. They are doing what a democratic institution is supposed to do: deliberating and weighing different options for extricating us from a horrid situation that we didn't have to get ourselves into in the first place. Does anyone know what Bush's plan is? "Stay the course." Because that's working so well already. Bush has a talking point to fax, but he has no plan.

Speaking of disingenuous, Wittman 1967 wants to blame the fiasco on the Iraqis, generalizing that "most of the Iraqis" would prefer violence to creating a "liberal democratic society." We didn't go in there, at least initially, to impose democracy (an oxymoronic concept at best). We went to prevent the mushroom cloud, or so we were told. We went because we knew not only what WMDs they had, but precisley how much or how many of each, according to Bush's state of the union address in 2003. If "most" Iraqis prefer "intertribal" warfare, why are tens of thousands fleeing into Syria? The Sunnis and Shiites are not tribes, by the way.

By Christmas we'll have lost 3000 American lives in Iraq. Afghanistan continues to revert to Taliban control. Hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians - a few of whom probably did not prefer "settling tribal scores" to raising their children in peace and security - have been killed by our weapons and by their own countrymen and mujahadeen attracted from elsewhere. Abu Ghraib, that icon of Saddam's brutality, has been rehabilitated to be an icon of American brutality. And the US has become a country that has "legalized" torture, indefinite detention, and warrantless wiretapping. What next? Shall we look forward to defending the poisoning of our dissidents in London restaurants? Whatever we do, as the original OpEd suggests, we must live our lives in such a way as to not please al-Qaeda. And who, anyway, is taking polls at al Qaeda encampments, that we know what they think of the changes in American political winds?

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