NewRichmondBlog
House resolution HR 571 It is the sense of the House that deployment of U. S. forces in Iraq be terminated immediately. The resolution was defeated 403 to 3; with 3 Democrats voting for it.
Sam Johnson (R-TX) gave an impassioned speech against the resolution and ran out of time. He requested three more minutes and the chairman said the usual: "Without exception-granted" One man yelled an objection and the chairman asked the man to stand. No one did so the extra time was granted.
Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) said that the resolution was nothing but a Republican political trick. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) said that Bush was out of the main stream of the American people. Jay Leno said that President Bush's approval rating is down to 36 percent. Three more points down and he will become of Democrat.
posted by Bob Ziller @ 8:57 AM
2 comments
2 Comments:
Bob:
Is the point of this blog to be the New Richmond version of OnTheBorderLine? Maybe you should keep your focus on local issues. Or, since you are the communications director for the St. Croix County Republican Party, should we expect the slant to be partisan politics?
As a member of the St. Croix County Democratic party, I know there are New Richmond people working with you who are involved with the St. Croix County Democratic Party. If people want to explore the national, state and local political issues from a partisan perspective, they can visit www.abovetheborderline.blogspot.com or www.ontheborderline.net.
As you say, let's stick to the issues.
Two comments here:
1. I believe Congressman Murtha was saying that the US start drawing down its troop levels immediately -- not evacuating Iraq of all US military. He is saying exactly what most retired military generals are saying publicly and what active miltary brass are most likely saying privately.
2. If you want to read an interesting article concerning this question, the December 2005 Atlantic Monthly has an interesting cover article by James Fallows.
Here's a summary:
Why Iraq Has No Army
(page 1 of 6)
An orderly exit from Iraq depends on the development of a viable Iraqi security force, but the Iraqis aren't even close...
When Saddam Hussein fell, the Iraqi people gained freedom. What they didn't get was public order. Looting began immediately, and by the time it abated, signs of an insurgency had appeared. Four months after the invasion the first bomb that killed more than one person went off; two years later, through this past summer, multiple-fatality bombings occurred on average once a day. The targets were not just U.S. troops but Iraqi civilians and, more important, Iraqis who would bring order to the country. The first major attack on Iraq's own policemen occurred in October of 2003, when a car bomb killed ten people at a Baghdad police station. This summer an average of ten Iraqi policemen or soldiers were killed each day. It is true, as U.S. officials often point out, that the violence is confined mainly to four of Iraq's eighteen provinces. But these four provinces contain the nation's capital and just under half its people.
The crucial need to improve security and order in Iraq puts the United States in an impossible position. It can't honorably leave Iraq—as opposed to simply evacuating Saigon-style—so long as its military must provide most of the manpower, weaponry, intelligence systems, and strategies being used against the insurgency. But it can't sensibly stay when the very presence of its troops is a worsening irritant to the Iraqi public and a rallying point for nationalist opponents—to say nothing of the growing pressure in the United States for withdrawal.
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I don't know how the Atlantic Monthly rates on the neo-conian vast left wing media conspiracy, but the Amercian Conservative magazine has some interesting articles on this issue including:
The Weekly Standard’s War
Murdoch’s mag stands athwart history yelling, “Attack!”
...That kind of ambiguous conclusion about the Standard’s and the neocons’ role in starting the war is what the undisputed and public evidence will sustain. The Standard was important. It amplified the views of “the 25” the way luncheon seminars at the American Enterprise Institute and other neocon think tanks never could have.
Its role can be likened to the Yellow Press, the Hearst papers and Pulitzer’s New York World, which did everything they could to instigate a war against Spain over Cuba in the 1890s and boosted their circulation mightily in the process. In the wake of 9/11, the Standard didn’t have to create the martial atmosphere artificially, just divert it from Osama to Saddam.
Without the Weekly Standard, would the invasion of Iraq taken place? It’s impossible to know. Without the Standard, other voices—including those of the realist foreign-policy establishment, which had been dominant in the first Bush administration and which opposed a precipitous campaign against Saddam—would have been on a more level playing field with the neocons. That would have made a difference.
So in a sense the Iraq War is Bill Kristol’s War as much as it is George W. Bush’s and Dick Cheney’s, and the Standard is the vehicle that made it possible. It should go down in history as Rupert Murdoch’s War as well, and thus becomes by far the most significant historical event ever to be shaped by the Murdoch media.
How ironic it would be if it were not, in the end, a war Rupert Murdoch particularly wanted.
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