Iraq PM to US - You Can Leave Anytime

As Nick Kristof explained the other day the Iraqi people want the US to end the occupation.

First, a poll this spring of Iraqis — who know their country much better than we do — shows that only 21 percent think that the U.S. troop presence improves security in Iraq, while 69 percent think it is making security worse. . . .

We simply can’t want to be in Iraq more than the Iraqis want us to be there. That poll of Iraqis, conducted by the BBC and other news organizations, found that only 22 percent of Iraqis support the presence of coalition troops in Iraq, down from 32 percent in 2005.

If Iraqis were pleading with us to stay and quell the violence, maybe we would have a moral responsibility to stay. But when Iraqis are begging us to leave, and saying that we are making things worse, then it’s remarkably presumptuous to overrule their wishes and stay indefinitely because, as President Bush termed it in his speech on Tuesday, “it is necessary work.”

Well now Iraqi Prime Minster Nouri al-Maliki says Iraq can manage without U.S..

BAGHDAD - Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki shrugged off U.S. doubts of his government's military and political progress on Saturday, saying Iraqi forces are capable and American troops can leave "any time they want."

One of his top aides, meanwhile, accused the United States of embarrassing the Iraqi government by violating human rights and treating his country like an "experiment in a U.S. lab."

Now I'm not sure if Maliki actually believes this, it's probably an attempt to show strength at a time when there is so much talk about a US withdrawal and the Iraqi people are so anti US.

This brings us to something few talk about - the mechanics of withdrawing. We have 160,000 troops, at least that many private contractors, and billions of dollars worth of equipment. Even with a good withdrawal plan leaving will be messy. Much of the Iraqi Army will join militants in fighting the US. There is not an air field or road in Iraq that can be secured. We have a second problem, who is going to come up with a "good plan". Most of the Pentagon's brain trust has been fired or driven out by Rumsfeld and the Bush administration. All that's left are the sycophants who would tell the administration what they wanted to hear. Leaving Iraq will make Vietnam's helicopters on the roof moment look like the cake walk the mis-adventure the war was supposed to be.

The "Real" Legacy of Gerald Ford - Part II

Yesterday I discussed how Gerald Ford became an accidental President at a time of "national crisis" and at the same time set up a second national crisis some 30 years later when he elevated two famously amoral and criminally incompetent backroom operators, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. Over at The Nation Jon Wiener picks up this aspect of the Ford legacy in Gerald Ford's Legacy: Cheney and Rumsfeld.

Gerald Ford is gone, but he lives on in two of his key appointees: Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. Their impact on America today is greater than Ford's, who died Tuesday at 93.

Ford appointed Rumsfeld his chief of staff when he took office after Nixon's resignation in 1974. The next year, when he made the 42-year-old Rumsfeld the youngest secretary of defense in the nation's history, he named 34-year-old Dick Cheney his chief of staff, also the youngest ever.

Those two Ford appointees worked together ever since. The Bush White House assertion of unchecked presidential power stems from the lessons they drew from their experience of working for the weakest president in recent American history. "For Dick and Don," Harold Meyerson wrote in The American Prospect last July, "the frustrations of the Ford years have been compensated for by the abuses of the Bush years."

And there is more:

Ford also named a new head of the CIA – a former Texas congressman named George H. W. Bush. Thus you could also credit also Ford with launching the Bush dynasty.

It was during Ford's presidency that the last Americans left Vietnam – that photo of them struggling to get into that chopper on the roof of the Saigon embassy remains our most powerful image of American defeat, and it shadows our current debate about how to get out of Iraq.

Gerald Ford may be gone but his legacy lives on. He accidentally came to posses the ring of power and handed it over to the forces of evil. The Dark Lord lives on in the form of the evil Dick Cheney.

Also see:
The "Real" Legacy of Gerald Ford

The "Real" Legacy of Gerald Ford

Over at LewRockwell.com Chris Floyd shows us that a picture can indeed be worth a thousand words when it comes to The Enduring Legacy of Gerald R. Ford

Yes, it was Gerald R. Ford who took those famously amoral and criminally incompetent backroom operators, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, out of the lower quadrants of the twisted bowels of the Nixon White House and raised them to the highest levels of American government, where, in one form or another, overtly and covertly, they have inflicted their primitive ideology and violent psychodramas on the nation, and the world, for more than three decades.

There is more, read the rest.

Update
MEJ's Bill in DC sends us this on Ford, Washington's Jones for Gerald Ford, a good read.