Diplomatic Surge Needed

The right is as usual misunderstanding or deliberately mischaracterizing the left’s view of the Presidents plan.  It is not that we want to lose the occupation by withdrawing our troops from Iraq.  It is about the fact that we have no faith the President’s plan will work.  This administration has been wrong every step of the way in Iraq.  Why should anyone believe, just one more time, that he got it right this time?  The President no longer has the credibility to propose a believable plan.

What many are upset about is that the President’s plan requires more people to die for the dubious promised gains.  The plan requires the Iraqi military to step up, yet they have shown repeatedly that they are not ready or interested.

We were promised a new strategy, what we got was a bigger push of the old strategy; “Stay the Course on Steroids”.  What we should be doing is paying more heed to the Baker/Hamilton report, which called for a surge in diplomacy, not in the military.  The Presidents’ ill-conceived plan calls for no diplomacy at all, just increased military action.  While his plan may achieve temporary territorial control, his plan will never achieve peace, and worse it may engulf the entire region in war if enacted.

This President’s weakest point is diplomacy, and that is the only way to resolve the situation.  The unacceptable cost of the Presidents plan is the lives that will be lost or devastated because this man will not talk to anyone without them first agreeing to everything he wants.  That is not diplomacy that is dictatorship, and while he was managing to shift our laws in that direction, the rest of the world does not have to play by his megalomaniacal rules.

Steve McGourty

12 January 2007