by James Glaser
August 28, 2003

Even though families of servicemen in Iraq are asking Washington to bring the troops home, Washington is listening to no one. The Generals and Congress want more troops sent, while more and more Veterans are looking at the continued daily loss of American lives.

President Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld say that they will send more troops if the Generals in the field request them. The Generals in the field know such a request would end their careers.

Washington keeps talking about more countries joining the coalition, but reports of massive military spending follows each new report. Spain is going to send a token force and Washington is going to spend 450 million dollars on our base in Spain. The Coalition is still the Coalition of the bought.

Soon those we are buying and our own military, will be the only foreigners in Iraq. That is on our side. Anyone in this world that has a bone to pick with America is heading to Iraq right now. And now, it is exit time for everyone else.

The international relief agency Oxfam said today it was pulling all of its non-Iraqi personnel out of the country because of the worsening violence there.

Oxfam is joining the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the European Commission, the International Committee of the Red Cross, Save the Children UK, and the Swedish Rescue Service Agency in getting out of Iraq.

Doctors Without Borders started moving out of Iraq weeks ago.

An Oxfam spokesman said, "We think that if the UN is given a lead role, it will be easier for the United Nations to demonstrate that sovereignty is coming back to the Iraqi People."

Washington is using Iraq like a magnet, trying to draw in every terrorist on the planet in hopes of defeating them in one place. George Bush's war in Iraq never ended and every day there are more attacks on American and Coalition troops. The flaw in this plan is the fact that there are 25 million innocent Iraqi civilians living in the War Zone..

These are the same people that have suffered under an American supported Saddam Hussein for twenty years and another dozen years under Hussein, without American support. These are the very people that we told the world we were liberating.

Congress and most of the high ranking military officials know that our troops are undermanned in Iraq and that is the reason so many Islamic radicals are getting into that country. We don't have enough troops to seal Iraq's borders, stop violence in the cities, and look for Saddam and his Weapons of Mass Destruction at the same time.

Because of the increased resistance to American occupation, the Iraqi people are still suffering from lack of clean drinking water, electricity, and they continue to suffer from extreme violence.

The people of Iraq know that as long as we are there the violence will continue. Those Iraqi's that are not working for Saddam, but are fighting for their country's freedom, know that it took the Vietnamese over a decade to push us out. They know that it took the Afghan's over a decade to push the Russians out of their country.

America is powerful, of that there is no doubt, but we have lost wars before or we have lost the will to win in other countries. These people fighting us in Iraq, look at Somalia and Lebanon and think if they can get that "big hit" on us we will leave, but if not, they can sit back and play the war of attrition with us for years and in the end we will have wasted thousands of American lives for another President that was afraid to end a war.

We are over there in the Iraqi peoples homeland. Things are not going to get better. Every time we get the water turned back on they will bomb another water main. Every time the electricity looks like it will stay on, it will get bombed. Oil pipe lines out in the desert are easy targets and those that oppose us will not let us make money off of their oil.

Today it was reported that Iraq is going to cost us tens of billions of dollars in the next year and that does not even count the billion we spend each week on our military. They are going to bleed us! First with the blood of our troops and then with the money we will have to spend "Liberating" those people.

There are lots of nations in this world that will cheer us on to victory, while at the same time send money, arms, and fighters to Iraq to help those fighting us. If Saudi Arabia would finance the terrorists that came all the way over here to attack us on September 11th, imagine how easy it is for them to get help to the "Islamic Freedom Fighters" in Iraq and you know that is what they are calling themselves.

Before we even attacked Iraq, we should have had an exit policy that not only we knew, but one that the Iraqi people knew about. That way the Iraqi people could say to themselves, we will let the Americans do such and such and then they will leave and we can run our country the way we want.

The way it is now, any Iraqi patriot would have to believe that the Americans are going to be there forever. They must believe that America is going to take over their oil and they will have the same thing Saddam gave them, nothing.

George screwed up big time on this one and what he should do is say to the United Nations, "Take it." We could walk away knowing that we got rid of Saddam, we found out for sure that he wasn't the threat some in Washington thought he was. We would be heroes to all the Iraqi people that suffered under Saddam and we would save hundreds of billions of dollars and maybe thousands of American lives.

America could be magnanimous and kick in fifty billion, maybe more to get Iraq back on its feet and we would make the terrorists look bad. On top of that many of the new recruits that the terrorists have gotten because of this war would go back home.

We told the world we were going to liberate the Iraqi people. We did that. Let us call that a victory!

POST SCRIPT DEATHS IN IRAQ

One Soldier was killed and three wounded in Falluja in which an "improvised explosive device" was used

In Baghdad, a Military Intelligence Brigade Soldier was killed in an attack on a convoy.

Central Command report an American Soldier was killed by a non-hostile gunshot.