Posted on 11/12/2006 7:40:13 AM PST by shrinkermd
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Democrats, who won majorities in the U.S. Congress in last week's elections, said on Sunday they will push for a phased withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq to begin in four to six months.
"The first order of business is to change the direction of Iraq policy," said Sen. Carl Levin (news, bio, voting record), a Michigan Democrat who is expected to be chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee in the new Congress.
Levin, on ABC's "This Week," said he hoped some Republicans would emerge to join Democrats and press the administration of President George W. Bush to tell the Iraqi government that U.S. presence was "not open-ended."
Bush has insisted that U.S. troops would not leave Iraq until the Iraqis were able to take over security for their country.
"We need to begin a phased redeployment of forces from Iraq in four to six months," Levin said.
Speaking on the same program, Sen. Joseph Biden (news, bio, voting record), a Delaware Democrat who is expected to head the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said he supported Levin's proposal for a withdrawal.
"fear the same. The President seems quite chastened by the vote. If he believes that withdrawing is the will of the American sheeple, which it is, unfortunately, I think he'll go along. He couldn't give them Rumsfeld's head on a platter fast enough, which was exactly the wrong thing to do, as it gave the Dems a taste of their new power, and now they're drunk with it. Like the emotional teenagers they are, the Dems will now test the limits of authority. With the constant MSM drumbeat about how great getting out of Iraq will be, I expect us to be mostly out by election '08."
Send him a note. Remind him that this was a very close vote and that we elected HIM to be COMMANDER IN CHIEF.
He has troops in the field. If Congress wants to order them back, let *them* give the order. He's still the President, it is still his job to lead.
comments@whitehouse.gov
Here is what I sent him ...
Glorious news to every terrorist in the world..."You Kill, We Run".
Great news also to the debased and pathological in our own country.
No nation or peoples would ever again make a committment with us.
You are right, in the real world.
But they have so twisted things around to make Bush look bad that they have convinced themselves that the opposite is true.
They believe that geting rid of Bush the great satan and the terrorists will have no reason to hate us anymore.
I know it's delusional but it's all they've got so they're working it to the hilt.
The problem is that their delusion is not limited to just our political landscape but is taking on a life of it's own.
It is "drying out the timber" around the world so that even a small spark at the right, or wrong, time could ignite everything. Like the start of WWI.
The Democrats will succeed only in getting themselves ousted as chaos breaks out around the world under "their watch". They have two years to mess up and no time to recover. They are emotion driven, peer-pressured dummies, and their true colors will show every time they open their mouths. Hooray!
They are also masters at spinning and obfuscating.
Like clinton trying to say he was on active duty so the Paula Jones case could not go forward. Or; "it depends on what the meaning of is, is". Or; he was never alone with Monica because there was always other people in Washington D.C..
It's going to fun and scary to see all the crazy things they come up with to escape responsibility.
To answer your question..YES AND YES...AS I ALWAYS DO EVERY SINGLE ELECTION IN THIS STATE.
Sit on it Potzi.
"Any similar request from the White House will now go straight to the round-file."
LEt the White House ask. Let the Congress debate. And watch the Democrats cave as they have a choice of being exposed as wanting to pull the rug out from under the troops or going along.
In truth, this horrible Democrat position is the 'opening bid', and as usual the Dems have signalled weakness to our enemies. Bush now is forced to find a viable alternative plan.
You may be interested in my take here:
http://freedomstruth.blogspot.com/
I can hear Clinton et al saying, "We're patriots." And the people believed them...incredible.
I believe Bush's words "If we don't fight them in Iraq, we will fight them here in America". As much as I disagree with much he has done or not done, on this I feel he is right on!
You know who he`s drawing don`t you? This wacko who was dancing in the street on 911. Look, he even has the plate with the chip on it. LOL!
I'll bet that they do exactly that.
You are right. I was being half sarcastic.
Yeah your right they have had 3 years is plenty of time for their nation to be just like ours. What's amazing to me is that we have been in Japan and Germany since WWII. We have been in South Korea since the Korean War. Heck we have been in Bosnia since the early Nineties. However, no one seems to want to leave there.
We will look back two years from now and realize that the Iraqi distraction will have pitted the ME states against each other, instead of against America.
Iran and Syria have fallen into the Roach Motel, SA and general conflagration is not far behind.
Look at Iraq as the Declaration of Independence followed several years later by real freedom earned in the Revolutionary War.
The ME Reformation has been set in motion.
BUMP
They won a 6 year mid-term election. They do not have a mandate on Iraq either.
Let them overplay their hand and we, with the help of God and good primaries, are gonna smash them in '08!
We are not leaving Iraq anytime soon and I fully expect us to have a military base there. It's strategic for the War on Terror which is the true reason we toppled an unfriendly regime.
Israel is sitting by and waiting.
"they will strike first reguardless"
They have not stuck anything, and stopped the Lebanon war over trivial losses and a few European appeasers having their shorts in a bunch.
"I do not believe Iran will get the bomb by making it themselves"
They are not installing 3000 centrifuges and building several nuclear reactors for their health. Nor for electricity. The former takes an industrial commitment in the tens of billions of dollars and years of lead time. Which we have given them - the IAEA caught them hiding work 4 years ago now and they have not faced the first consequence for any of it. Our money is paying for all of it through the higher oil prices their saber rattling causes. Meanwhile Russia has continued work on the Bushner reactor and they have also worked on another etc. They don't need to force anyone, everyone is only too happy to sell them stuff, to take the US down a peg. The EU insisted we do nothing except offer them goodies to stop, we offered and they turned it all down. We demanded sanctions and Russia and China said no. EU was willing to have sanctions until the Lebanon war, but since it they have dropped the idea of anything more than a few travel restrictions.
"Unlike us the Irealis will not hesitate to use thier Bomb"
They are in fact hesitating. Or rather, they do not show the slightest sign they will do anything serious about it.
"if thier future may depend on it."
Their future does depend on it. But they just sit there.
In short you are delusional about the imaginary excess resolve of Israel. It doesn't have any.
Nobody is going to come riding over the hill (or down out of the clouds) to save us. If we let them, and we are, Iran will get nuclear weapons and the world will just sit and watch. And the result will be that the war on terror will last a generation and in all likelihood will end in nuclear war.
Denial about all of this is the leading cause of such developments in the first place. You are in denial. Your specific form of it consists of passing the buck. There are a hundred forms of it, from just not paying attention to sunny optimism about deterrence to belief that somebody else will do something to hope for revolution in Iran to hope against all evidence that Iran will accept some "deal", etc.
The operative reality is very simple - political flak over Iraq has made the potential costs of stopping Iran high enough no one is willing to contemplate paying it, and Iran knows this. The much higher costs of letting them get nuclear weapons are off in an uncertain future and nobody pays remotely sufficient attention to them because of it. Which they also know and count on.
And it is working. It will go on working until we get off our freaking backsides. Since the American people just voted to sit on their coaches and pretend it will all go away, that will not be any time soon. Iran is winning.
I do not have to like any of this to see it. I simply refuse to cloud my sight or judgment with transparently empty hopes.
If anyone had told the US people that nation building was the objective and that our troops would be getting shot up 3.5 years into the process while Iraqis shot it out with one another the answer to go to Iraq would have been, No.
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