Commentary: Doomsday in Iraq — is it really just around the corner?

[unhappycamper]

Commentary: Doomsday in Iraq — is it really just around the corner?
By Tom Engelhardt | Los Angeles Times
Posted on Thursday, March 11, 2010

We've now been at war intermittently with Iraq for almost 20 years, and with Afghanistan for 30. It adds up to nearly half a century of experience, all bad.

Yet an expanding crew of Washington-based opiners is calling for President Obama to extend the misery, urging the administration to alter its plans — negotiated in the last months of the George W. Bush administration — for the departure of all American troops from Iraq by the end of 2011. Pulling out on schedule, they argue, would virtually assure civil violence and ethnic bloodletting in Iraq.

According to these doomsayers, our withdrawal as scheduled would encourage Shiite militias to stage a violence-filled comeback. Iranian interference in Iraqi affairs would increase - bringing more violence. And the group al-Qaeda in Iraq would move to fill any power void with its own destructive agenda.


~snip~

Few remember anymore, but we went through a version of this 40 years ago in Vietnam. In that conflict too, Americans were repeatedly told that the U.S. couldn't withdraw because, if we left, the enemy would launch a "bloodbath" in South Vietnam. This future blood bath of the imagination appeared in innumerable official speeches and accounts. It became so real that it sometimes seemed to put the actual, ongoing blood bath in Vietnam in the shade, and for years it provided a winning explanation for why any departure would have to be interminably and indefinitely delayed.

But when the last American took that last helicopter out, the blood bath didn't happen.

Rest of article at: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/03/11/90198/doomsday-in-iraq-is-it-really.html



unhappycamper comment: Time to come home, Guys.

[Junkdrawer]

1. And besides, if we leave, they may rescind the oil sharing agreements....

Priorities, people.

[Mari333]

2. 'the war profits boss, the warrr profits"! Even the dems in congress

prefer neverending war (profits)cept for a couple decent dems, the rest are corrupt.

the money , boss!!

Corporate interests demand we send OUR children to die for corporate profits.

[The_Commonist]

3. "But when the last American took that last helicopter out, the blood bath didn't happen..."

No, it happened in Cambodia instead.