Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Oh, and maybe someone can read it to him.

Ok, so up till now it seems like the Democrats in Congress have no will to actually leave Iraq. And, sad to say, some of the same people who voted to support the war, also supported the surge. Perhaps there is no good plan to leave Iraq, only a field of very bad choices. Well, you can’t say we didn’t tell you so. That’s why you don’t get in to wars like this.

But, alas, we did go in.

An old liberal Democratic warhorse has come up with an idea on how to actually leave Iraq. Remember Senator George McGovern? For those of you my age, that’s a stupid question.

For the rest of you, he was the guy who won Massachusetts and DC in the 1972 Presidential election, but came in second to Nixon. Yes, the election right before Watergate and Nixon’s resignation. Perhaps if he were the president back then…but I digress.

Senator McGovern has written a book with William R. Polk, Out of Iraq: A Practical Plan for Withdrawal Now. And it’s in paperback, too.

But don’t take my word for it. Here is what the folks at the Middle East Policy Council have to say about the book:

“The real importance of McGovern and Polk’s short book has been to offer an alternative framing of the choices facing America in Iraq from those found in either the careful calls for regional diplomacy and redeployment of the Baker-Hamilton Commission’s report or the president’s wildly unpopular and almost certainly doomed choice to instead “surge” tens of thousands of additional American troops into Iraq. The once heretical idea of a rapid American withdrawal has now moved to the center of American politics. Withdrawal gets ever-more support in public-opinion polls and has been endorsed by Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, while both houses of Congress passed a bill containing the (unenforceable) demand for a 2008 departure date. Detailed proposals for a withdrawal are popping up everywhere from The Nation (Juan Cole) to the Council on Foreign Relations (Steven Simon) to MIT’s Security Studies program (Barry Posen). Clearly, a sea change has taken place in American politics on the question of Iraq. Out of Iraq may one day be read as a key crystallization of this moment.”

Buy one and send it to President Bush for the coming holiday season.

No comments: