E Pluribus Unum

Virtually everything that Bush and Co. says will happen if we "cut and run" out of Iraq -- i.e., population in despair, our military in strategic peril, an Iraqi government too weak to provide security, militias and armed bands killing innocent people at will -- virtually all of those things are happening now, in Iraq, after over four years of our present occupation:

An influential retired Army general released a dire assessment of the situation in Iraq, based on a recent round of meetings there with Gen. David H. Petraeus and 16 other senior U.S. commanders.

"The population is in despair," retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey wrote in an eight-page document compiled in his capacity as a professor at West Point. "Life in many of the urban areas is now desperate."
[...]
[McCaffrey's] bottom line is that the U.S. military is in "strategic peril" -- a sharp contrast to his previous views.
[...]
The government lacks dominance in every province, he added. One result is that "no Iraqi government official, coalition soldier, diplomat, reporter, foreign NGO [nongovernmental organization], nor contractor can walk the streets of Baghdad, nor Mosul, nor Kirkuk, nor Basra, nor Tikrit, nor Najaf, nor Ramadi, without heavily armed protection."

Militias and armed bands are "in some ways more capable of independent operations" than the Iraqi army, he added.

Enough.

Congress will soon send a bill to Bush giving him everything he asked for in the way of war funding. But he has vowed to veto it because it forces him to end the occupation within the next 18 months. And if he vetoes it, the troops will be denied the funds they need to pack up and come home safely. If that happens the blame will lie with the president and no one else.

Call your Congressman and call your Senators. Tell them to support the bills in the House and the Senate that wind this war down. Tell them to stand firm.

And contact the White House and tell the president to sign the bill when it reaches his desk.

Enough.