Tom Hayden: Ending It: How to End the Iraq War and Occupation

[marmar]

from CommonDreams:


Published on Saturday, February 17, 2007 by CommonDreams.org
Ending It: How to End the Iraq War and Occupation
by Tom Hayden

Summary:

1. Stop funding a sectarian Baghdad regime based on lethal militias.

2. Support a transitional regime in Baghdad which will concur in a plan for US military withdrawal. Set a deadline of six months to one year.

3. Begin a diplomatic offensive to assure regional and international attention to remaining security, reconstruction and reconciliation issues.

4. Make Congressional funding contingent on adoption of such a plan.

Discussion:

Despite promises to the contrary, the US has placed in power a sectarian coalition of Shi’as and Kurds who wield power through the Badr militia and the peshmerga. The coalition is carrying out ethnic cleansing in the name of security. Baghdad, once a mixed city of five million people, is dominated by a huge Shi’a majority. Fifty of 51 members of the Baghdad governing council are Shi’a. Sunnis have fled by the tens of thousands, or live in isolated and besieged enclaves. While all sides are employing abhorrent tactics, the Americans are the backbone of a majority-Shi’a regime whose police, commandos and security forces, infiltrated by the Badr brigades, routinely drag Sunnis from their homes, torture and execute them, or detain large numbers in a network of secret prisons accountable only to the Interior Ministry. American officials who have trained and funded these forces now admit they are out of control. But these Frankensteins are an American responsibility. ........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.commondreams.org/views07/0217-01.htm

[Peace Patriot]

1. Cut the U.S. military budget by 90%, down to a true defensive posture,

(no more wars of choice!), dismantle all U.S. military bases in foreign lands and bring our troops home, and get on with rebuilding our economy on "green" energy and undoing all the damage to constitutional government and to democracy that the Bush Junta has inflicted.

"...these Frankensteins are an American responsibility." --Tom Hayden

Nope, I don't buy it. We certainly owe the Iraqi people reparations. But we have absolutely no right to be there, or no right to say anything at all about their government or their society--let alone to intervene in situations that the U.S. military is making worse, every day, with their presence in Iraq. The Bush Junta has created exactly the kind of murderous, renegade government in Iraq that they themselves are. They CANNOT solve this problem, and they have made such a disaster that no one in the U.S. can solve it. We must pay reparations, and turn it over to a regional crisis intervention consortium and the United Nations.