In the Washington Post:

The time for more U.S. troops in Iraq has passed. We do not have more troops to send and, even if we did, they would not bring a resolution to Iraq. Militaries are built to fight and win wars, not bind together failing nations. We are once again learning a very hard lesson in foreign affairs: America cannot impose a democracy on any nation — regardless of our noble purpose.

We have misunderstood, misread, misplanned and mismanaged our honorable intentions in Iraq with an arrogant self-delusion reminiscent of Vietnam. Honorable intentions are not policies and plans. Iraq belongs to the 25 million Iraqis who live there. They will decide their fate and form of government.

[...]

The United States must begin planning for a phased troop withdrawal from Iraq. The cost of combat in Iraq in terms of American lives, dollars and world standing has been devastating. We’ve already spent more than $300 billion there to prosecute an almost four-year-old war and are still spending $8 billion per month. The United States has spent more than $500 billion on our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And our effort in Afghanistan continues to deteriorate, partly because we took our focus off the real terrorist threat, which was there, and not in Iraq.

I seem to remember a bunch of crazy, unrealistic libertarians predicting all of this would happen. Good for Hagel, who has been critical of the war for some time. Who’ll be the next GOPer to step up?

Hagel’s probably the only guy on the GOP side I could vote for in 2008. Too bad he doesn’t have a chance. The two guys I could probably have voted for on the Democrat side — Feingold and Warner — dropped out (yes, I know, Feingold is awful on many issues, but his dissent on civil liberties alone is worth a vote). Think of the possible nightmares that leaves us. Clinton-Bayh vs. Romney-Huckabee. Get psyched! And maybe toss in an independent McCain-Lieberman ticket. Do you want big, bigger, or biggest government?

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 25th, 2006 at 10:45 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.