Warner: All Options On The Table
by Mark Adams X-Posted at D-KOS
How many times have we heard it? Whether it was an explicit threat to a dictator that we would engage in preventive war, or the implicit threat that we're not afraid to test the latest "almost nuke" bunker-busting air-fuel penetrators in Iran, or the real thing in North Korea -- Washington has always maintained that it's best for the President to maintain the flexibility to always be able to state: "All Options Are On The Table."
Unfortunately, the unimaginative Neander-Con cabal who have highjacked our foreign policy only view this doctrine in one direction: escalation of military force to the point of total annihilation.
I don't believe that the idea of military flexibility is flawed. It's use by the imperialist "unitary executive", sadly, is short-sighted.
Miraculously, some of the grown-ups in the GOP have remembered how the game really should be played.
Jonathan Singer at MyDD reads the New York Times, so you don't get ink on your fingers:
The Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee warned Thursday that the situation in Iraq was 'drifting sideways' and said that the United States should consider a 'change of course' if violence did not diminish soon.The chairman, Senator John W. Warner of Virginia, expressed particular concern that Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki had not moved decisively against sectarian militias.
'In two or three months if this thing hasn't come to fruition and this level of violence is not under control, I think it's a responsibility of our government to determine: Is there a change of course we should take?' Senator Warner said.
He did not specify what shift might be necessary in Iraq, but he said that the American military had done what it could to stabilize Iraq and that no policy options should be taken 'off the table.' He was speaking at a Capitol Hill news conference after returning from a Middle East trip that included a one-day visit to Baghdad. [My emphasis]
The administration's "tough-talk" policies backed them into a corner where any Iraq discussion is either painted as "cut-and-run" or "stay-the-course." For a smart sounding executive who proclaimed that we would bring the perpetrators of 9/11 to justice at a "time and place of our choosing," refusing to consider either an escalation of our commitment, or a scaled back redeployment is stubbornly child-like in the extreme.
The heavy hitters are finally, at long last, weighing in.. Colin Powell has added sanity to the argument that, "Staying the course in Iraq isn't enough because a course has to have an end."
There's a lot of blood on their hands for not speaking out years ago. Their newly found backbones will be of little comfort to the families that will bury their loved ones in the coming months while a nation obsesses on the intimate details of Congressional cyber-sex.
But hopefully, the emerging backbone of respected conservative leaders like Warner and Powell (a dwindling species of honorable Republicans) will prove that such talk does not embolden our enemies, rather it will embolden the chickenshit fence sitters to stand up to Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and Bush once and for all.
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Categories: War in Iraq
