Hypocrisy; thy name is Republican

So the Republicans spent the past week or so filleting the Democrats over our Iraq strategy. Most D’s want some sort of plan to extricate the US troops for that hellhole while the R’s will offer no plan at all, only assurances that things are getting better and we will leave when Iraq is stable. They only want to create the false choice between ‘cut and run’ and ‘stay the course’; neither of which will solve Iraq’s problems. But it does make for a snappy rejoinder to any query more complicated or adversarial than ‘How much should I support the President and his Grand Iraqi Adventure’?

Any questioning of the current policy usually results in complaints that the liberals are not supporting the troops. When pressed for specifics that would allow the US to withdraw and protect said troops, the response is either:
1. ‘We will stand down when the Iraqis stand up’ or some such similarly vague bullshit that has not been defined.
2. ‘We will let the Generals decide our troop levels’.

You will notice that the ‘We will leave when the Iraqis ask us’ strategy is no longer operative as the Iraqis have stated, repeatedly, that they want us to leave. As Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) put it:

"The Iraqi government, the Iraqi people, want (sic) the United States out of Iraq. They see us as oppressors, rather than liberators. That's just a fact of life."

Well, now we have General Casey planning to draw down forces by 20,000 by the end of the year. You know, just in time for the election. Is there anything demonstrably different here from the D’s plan? No – the end of year is just an arbitrary deadline, picked for (it seems) purely political purposes. According to CNN, the R’s even knew of the plan before they decided to attack the D’s very similar ideas. Mitch McConnell admits as much.

In the end, this bunch of weasels wants to use Iraq to portray the D’s as weak. This little episode reveals what Republicans really think of the war and our troops overseas – they are 130,000 campaign props to be used at the ruling party’s discretion.

This is why politics is important, because bad, cynical policy can make people dead. Not correcting a bad, cynical, deadly policy just makes more people dead.