Not a Good Week For the War
Well, it certainly was an anti-Iraq War Week.

First, bi-partisan senators joined together to demand a report from the President every three months on what's happening and what the plans for withdrawal are. That let the tiger out of the cage.

Former presidents manage to keep above the fray, I have noticed. Any criticisms from a former president tend to be generally political and somewhat muted. It's almost as if they know the pain of the decision-making that has to go on in the White House and give 'em a break. Well, Bill Clinton broke the silence Wednesday. Here is part of what he said as reported in The Independent Online:

Mr Clinton weighed in from the Middle East, saying the war as it unfolded was "a big mistake". It was a good thing Saddam Hussein had gone, the former president said, "but I don't agree with what was done". The administration underestimated "how easy it would be to overthrow Saddam and how hard it would be to unite the country".

He said President George Bush had made "several errors, including the total dismantlement of the authority structure of Iraq". He added: "We never sent enough troops and didn't have enough troops to control or seal the borders." Across those porous borders, "the terrorists came in. That was the central mistake, and we're still living with that".

Today it was a Hawkish Democrat and a big supporter of the war (from Bloomberg.com):

Pennsylvania Congressman John Murtha, a Vietnam War veteran and the top Democrat on the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, called today for the immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq.

"We need to turn Iraq over to the Iraqis," Murtha told a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington.

Murtha said U.S. forces could be completely out of the Mideast nation in as soon as six months. "Before the Iraqi elections, scheduled for mid-December, the Iraqi people and the emerging government must be put on notice that the United States will immediately redeploy," he said.

Needless to say the administration is on big-time damage control with all kinds of accusations flying at the democrats.

It seems I have heard all this before... and yet there seems in my gut to be some bits of difference from Vietnam. I'm not entirely sure how all that plays out, but for some reason this old, gray-haired pacifist would sure hate to see us just pull out wishing the Iraqi's a nice day and lots of luck in the future. Perhaps, like in Vietnam the problem lies more in philosophy, poor planning, lack of cultural awareness and, in the end, partisan politics that in the actual military action.

In other words, the whole thing was flawed from the beginning with false information and an ideologically-based attitude. I think we could salvage it and help Iraq grow into as democratic a government as is possible there at the moment, but there will need to be some serious shifts in thinking in Washington.

THAT is what we owe both to the Iraqi people and to those Americans and others who have died getting them this far.