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Ready for your month-long vacation? You do get all of August off… don’t you?
Well, one group planning to enjoy R&R for the entirety of August is the very group that most needs to say on the job and – how shall I put this? – GET SOMETHING DONE! It’s the Iraqi government. The parliament has announced that its members are going to vacate the capitol and chill out during August.
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Excuse me? Isn’t there a war rampaging over there? Aren’t these the squabbling sectarian leaders who haven’t been able to come to a political consensus and muster a security force to run their own country? Don’t we have troops being killed and maimed every day in THEIR civil war? Aren’t U.S. taxpayers dumping $10 billion a month into the morass of Iraq?
And now they’re taking a month off?
If their summer abdication of responsibility is not grounds for voting to withdraw our troops – what is? I agree with Republican Sen. Gordon Smith: “This is a fight that is theirs, not ours.”
Yet Bush PR flack Tony Snow meekly tried to rationalize the Iraqi leaders abandonment of duty by saying, “Well, it’s 130 degrees in Bahgdad in August.” You want hot, Tony? Go strap on the hot, heavy war gear that Bush has got our soldiers wearing in that summer heat. Will they be given August off to chill out?
Meanwhile, Bush’s Senate allies killed another vote to set a firm timetable for getting our troops out of there. Their excuse for holding them in Iraq’s civil war is that if we leave, chaos will follow. Hello… Iraq is chaos! It’s not worth the life of another U.S. soldier to try to fix what their so-called “leaders” clearly feel no urgency to fix for themselves.
Besides, the same “chaos” excuse was used to prolong the Vietnam War. We left and what happened? Not chaos – golf! Yes, a series of seven golf resorts are now strung along the Ho Chi Minh Trail…. and Americans are invited to come play.
“Senate Democrats Lose Support on Pullout Vote,” The New York Times, July 16, 2007
White House Press Briefing, www.whitehouse.gov, July 13, 2007
“Bob Schieffer’s Walter Cronkite Moment,” www.dailykos.com, July 15, 2007