FU BoHerd! These people don't buy that BS! Support for Kerry's position from people who actually know what they're talking about:
Leadership On Iraq
The Huffington Post
By Gary Hart
John Kerry has drawn a line in the sands of Iraq and has forcefully and specifically laid down a marker for the administration, the Democratic party, and the nation.
No other public official to date has had the courage to face the truth, that Iraqi democracy is now, finally, up to the Iraqi people, not the United States.
The Bush administration must now be required to respond to the Kerry time-table, to refute it with more than slogans and rhetoric, and to tell the American people, once and for all, when and how we intend to extricate ourselves from this Vietnam-in-the-desert.
Other Democratic leaders must now be heard on the question of whether they agree or disagree, in specific terms, with the Kerry initiative.
By revealing the brutal truth, that we cannot impose liberal democracy on a people that will not achieve and protect it for themselves, Senator Kerry has gone a very long way toward filling the vacuum in Democratic party leadership felt by too many Americans.
For those of us who never accepted the Bush administration's justification of the war, and did not accept the default argument that we were in the evil-dictator-removal business, Senator Kerry has offered a voice of opposition and a carefully constructed plan for returning the responsibility for Iraqi governance to the Iraqi people and their political leaders.
This is a very welcome development for American foreign policy and prestige in the new world of the 21st century.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Statement of U.S. Senator Russ Feingold On Senator John Kerry's Call for an End to Our Military Mission in Iraq
By Senator Russ Feingold
“Since August 18, 2005 I have been calling on the Administration to aim to redeploy U.S. military personnel from Iraq by the end of this year so that we can focus on the threat posed by global terrorist networks. I applaud Senator Kerry’s call today for our combat forces to be withdrawn from Iraq by the end of this year. Senator Kerry has been a strong leader in calling for a clear, coherent strategy to complete our military mission in Iraq while engaging Iraq’s leaders with genuine diplomacy. Having just visited Iraq last month, I witnessed the desperate need for Iraqi politicians to form a unity government to prevent the country from falling deeper into violence. Senator Kerry is absolutely right to say that the end of this year is a reasonable target date for redeploying our troops in Iraq.”
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A Brother in Arms
By Max Cleland
I’m proud of my friend John Kerry for speaking up.
He’s been in some tough political fights these last years and he fought like hell. It would’ve been easy to walk away, but that’s not who John is. Losing a hard and bitter campaign made John think even more about what he cares about, reflect on what got him into public service in the first place, and now he’s fighting his heart out right now with all the conviction and passion he had at 27. There’s an old saying that I believe in, and I believe applies to my friend John today: he’s “stronger at the broken places.”
John ‘s OpEd in today’s New York Times is the best of his head and his heart.
He knows it’s hard serving in a war that’s gone wrong. It’s even harder when you know there are politicians in Washington afraid to speak out for a better policy.
Say what you will, but my friend John Kerry today stood up and spoke out about what he believes has gone wrong in Iraq and what has to happen – how he believes we can get tough with the Iraqis, get our brave troops home, and give the Iraqi people a shot at their own democracy.
Now, I know what’s going to happen next – and so does John. Way back in 1971 when he testified in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, John took a stand against those who say we can’t ask tough questions because we are at war – and he paid a heavy price – he had the full force of the Nixon White House used against him. He knows those tactics haven’t gone away. Every time someone has the guts to speak up – whether it was John in 2004 or Jack Murtha in 2005 or John again now in 2006 – they get attacked.
John’s not afraid of any of that – because he believes wartime is when we a moral responsibility to ask the hardest questions of all, that’s how you keep faith with the brave men and women in uniform who are putting something bigger than their reputations on the line.
I’m proud of John – and I hope you’ll help him change our Iraq policy, and I hope you’ll stand by him when the right wing attack machine tries to Swift Boat him again. This is too important for our country -- we can’t sit here silently and let history repeat itself. Good for John for telling it straight and letting the chips fall where they may. That’s all the honor anyone needs in their lives.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
An Exit Strategy for Iraq
By Retired Air Force Colonel James Callard
We mean to find and engage everyone who can be engaged. That is because we believe in the Jeffersonian principle that a democracy cannot function well if its people are ignorant about matters that truly concern them.
- General Chuck Boyd, USAF (ret.)
War is not an instrument of policy; it is a failure of policy.
- Former Colorado US Senator Gary Hart
National security is everybody’s business. General Boyd’s words (above) come from a 1999 speech he gave as executive director of a three year bipartisan study on National Security. During my time in Washington DC, this bipartisan study on national security was the best I had ever read. Former US senators Gary Hart and Warren Rudman co-chaired the commission that produced this seminal and wide-reaching work. In fact, Gary Hart, who spoke recently in Durango to over 250 democrats summarized much of what was in this report in his book, The Fourth Power—A Grand Strategy for the United States in the Twenty-First Century. According to Senator Hart, the fourth power is the power of our principles. Senator Hart reminds us that before we start exporting our values and ideals, we need to live them.
More than three years, before the invasion of Iraq General Boyd said that our greatest challenge in the world was to “manage resentment.” How are we doing? Clearly we have failed to manage resentment against the United States in the international community. We have failed to keep a low profile in the Middle East, and now we have set the conditions for civil war in Iraq. The Bush administration has tried to implement a foreign policy based on a pursuit of empire that is in fundamental conflict with our values, ideals and the principles that made this nation great.
There is still no sustainable grand strategy for the nation and the invasion of Iraq is a sucking chest wound irreparably damaging the vital organs of the nation. In a recent Time Magazine editorial, Retired Marine Corps General, Greg Newbold’s, piece entitled, “Why Iraq Was a Mistake,” is even more blunt: “My sincere view is that the commitment of our forces to this fight was done with a casualness and swagger that are the special province of those who have never had to execute these missions—or bury the results.”
Sacrificing a nation’s blood and treasure at the altar of empire is nothing new, but the argument for empire as an American goal has recently blossomed—again. Naval Academy graduate and distinguished historian, William Appleman Williams, made an argument in Empire As A Way of Life, that we have always pursued empire to our detriment. In contrast Max Boot in his recent book on small wars suggests that America should be less apologetic, less hesitant to deploy power, and less humble about fighting these “savage wars of peace” that are necessary to enlarge the “empire of liberty.” He thinks the Spanish American War period should be a model for the future.
We should remember that Naval strategist, Alfred Mahan who was one of the architects of our imperial strategy during that time period said then that “I can conceive few more pitiful sensations than that of fretting about what the public thinks.” His view of the public's role in shaping foreign policy and national security strategy was not unique. He saw democracy and the Constitution—“the lion in the path"—as obstacles to the President's ability to protect U.S. interests overseas. War was"--an occasional excess, from which recovery is easy." Tell that to the wounded coming back from Iraq.
Indeed, many still cling to the view that the United States must maintain its empire or the world, especially the United States, will be less secure and less prosperous. Others scholars go even further and suggest that Britain’s failure to maintain her empire was “the necessary, if not sufficient condition for the two world wars of the 20th Century.” Robert Kaplan suggested before the war in Iraq, that: "The real question is not whether the American military can topple Saddam's regime but whether the American public has the stomach for imperial involvement of a kind we have not known since the United States occupied Germany and Japan."
But this is a vision of the few for the many. It is a nostalgic view of the past and ignores the revolutionary trends of the future. The effects of globalism and a new level of transparency and openness in society today make it extremely difficult to implement policy or develop a national security strategy that is not in line with both the core values, principles and vital interests of the American people. Indeed, even as Michael Mandelbaum argues in his new book that empire is better than the alternatives, he also suggests that in the long run, the American people “will not pay for it; they will not continue to criticize it; and they will miss it when it is gone.”
What to do. We must once again reject empire as a national policy. The neo-conservatives that backed this unilateral go-it-alone strategy are breaking ranks. Francis Fukuyama is the most recent neo-conservative intellectual who is honest enough to say that the use of military means in Iraq will not establish the desired political ends and that Iraq has become a “magnet, a training ground and operational base for Jihadist terrorists, with plenty of American targets to shoot at.” As Gary Hart has written, “We believe that America’s purposes are best achieved not through empire and force, but through principle and persuasion.”
We must get out of Iraq. Time is of the essence. We must not forget that half of the service members listed on the Vietnam Memorial Wall died after America’s leaders knew our strategy would not work. Seasoned veterans and seasoned statesmen like Congressman Murtha and Senator John Kerry have laid out an exit strategy. Iraqi politicians should be told that they have until May 15 to put together an effective unity government or we will immediately withdraw our military. Second we need a schedule for withdrawing American combat forces by year’s end.
Third, we need a grand strategy that fits our ideals and values and that allows us to project power and influence with less risk and more credibility without jettisoning our ideals, principles and values.
At the same time we need to implement a “Marshall Plan” for developing alternative energy. We can’t afford not to do this. Gary Hart reminds us of the true costs of our current energy policy: "Right now, America's energy policy is to rely on foreign oil supplies and to go to war for them if they are threatened. We are using our military, that is to say, young Americans, as the guarantor of our wasteful lifestyle.”
We got fooled again. Time to pick ourselves up, fire the incompetent and fiscally irresponsible, and vote this coming fall for candidates local and national with some backbone that will put this country back on a path toward a democratic republic that lives it values rather than attempts to expand an empire.
James Callard is a retired Air Force Colonel. He teaches courses at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado and for the University of Colorado at Denver
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
When Will the Bush Administration Get It?
By Jeremy D. Broussard
Senator Kerry’s excellent op-ed piece today correctly puts the onus on the Iraqi government, not the U.S., to resolve the impasse in forming the government and stopping the civil war. Unless the Iraqis get serious about governing their own country and solving their own problems, we will have to leave. The role of the U.S. military is not to referee a civil war. The conflict in Iraq is not about our presence or terrorism. It’s about sectarian tensions that the Iraqi government has failed to address.
The presence of over 100,000 U.S. military personnel longer has any bearing on whether or not Iraq’s civil war will continue. We cannot stop that conflict militarily not can we choose a side. If there is no political solution from the Iraqis, then there is no viable role for U.S. forces in Iraq.
Senator Kerry and many career soldiers and diplomats get this. When will the Bush Administration get it?
Jeremy D. Broussard is a former Army Captain who served in Operation Iraq Freedom in 2003
http://www.johnkerry.com/pressroom/news/news_2006_0426c.html
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
