"PULLING OUT OF IRAQ"

Or, If It’s Too Late for Prophylactics, Then Let’s Use a Morning After Pill

We cannot travel back in time to when the Bush Jr.’s invasion of Iraq could have been averted, but we can choose not to make it worse then it already is. A few suggestions are as follows:

1. Remove the incompetents currently in charge.

a. Fire Rumsfeld and the “yes men” he and the White House ensconced in the upper echelons of the Pentagon and intelligence agencies.

b. Impeach Bush and Cheney or turn them over to the International Court of Justice for a trial to see if war crimes have been committed.

c. Require oaths of truthfulness with penalties of perjury hereafter on whether the justifications given for the war to start were honest and apply the same test for all justifications for it continuing.

d. Call back into service the fired and retired generals who accurately predicted costs and results.

2. Change tactics until we can finally complete withdrawal from Iraq.

a. Insure our troops finally have sufficient armor, supplies and men to protect themselves.

b. Insist the Iraqis handle their own problems and wish them luck.

c. Stop using weapons that are likely to result in civilian casualties. Even a “smart bomb” has a wide blast radius.

d. If in doubt in any particular situation, follow US police procedure and allow combatants to escape rather than endanger civilians thereby converting their relatives into militants. It’s more risky for the troops, but safer in the long run by preventing more combatants from being created.

e. Strictly follow the Code of Military Justice, the Geneva Conventions and the US Constitution as they were before they were perverted by Bush and his attorney generals.

f. Eliminate all mercenaries who are not bound by such codes and laws.

g. Investigate all corporations for corruption and profiteering. Maybe hang a few as traitors, not merely criminals.

h. Consider:

i. partitioning Iraq since its currently borders were arbitrarily from the beginning and imposed by the British after WWI, or

ii. allowing someone else to do the occupation duty if anyone is silly enough, or

iii. doing a “Nixon” by simply declaring victory and pulling out immediately.

3. Adopt neutrality and fairness as Middle East foreign policy.

a. Insist Israel as well as Arabs obey UN resolutions.

b. Act through persuasion or containment. Use military might, especially its destructive capabilities, only as a last resort.

c. Even then, act only with UN or genuine multi national forces including Arab ones.

d. Stop referring to this in “us versus them” themes especially using such connotatively loaded language like calling it a “Crusade.”

e. Rachet down the hyperbole level as for example, stop referring to it as a “War for Civilization.”

4. Regain moral high ground by:

a. Publically abandoning the policy of pre-emptive attacks. Save force for vigorously repelling pre-emptive attacks as we did when we evicted Saddam for invading Quait

b. Do a “Mel Gibson” type apology with more sincerity.

c. See also suggestions 1 through 3 above.

5. Convert to alternate energy sources such as wind and solar so terror states with oil resources are no longer being funded by profits from our oil addiction.

6. Act like we are at genuinely at war.

a. Penalize use of oil.

b. Increase port, container and other transportation inspections

c. Beef up security generally here especially for risky infrastructure, dangerous industrial facilities, schools, large buildings and crowd attractions.

d. Increase the number of military and re-institute the draft.

e. Tax the rich who benefit from it to pay for it.

7. To insure such blunders don’t happen again,

a. Require our leaders to get at least a “C” in history.

b. For future uses of force (at least as to those wars which will be started by our pre-emptive attacks), require a formal declaration of war as required right now by the Constitution so the matter can be debated with honest debate, not the sham we had recently.