Get Them Out Tomorrow

Seldom these days does a member of the corporate media speak with such clarity, passion, and righteousness as Anna Quindlen did in a column in a recent issue of Newsweek:

Tomorrow. That's when the United States should begin to bring combat forces home from Iraq. Today would be a better option, but already it's tomorrow in Baghdad, in the Green Zone fortress Americans have built in the center of the city, out in the streets where IEDs are lying in wait for passing soldiers and every marketplace may be the endgame for a suicide bomber.

More excerpts:

America finds itself back where it began, before more than 3,000 U.S. soldiers died, before hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were killed or maimed. When George W. Bush was bound and determined to send troops to Baghdad, most of his European allies counseled more diplomacy, more attempts to shape Iraq from the outside, more involvement from other Arab nations. The answer to the mess the administration has made since then is to go back. It should go back to the solutions it rejected in favor of international chest thumping, chest thumping that has now cost thousands of American families their sons and daughters, mothers and fathers, husbands and wives, and has cost the people who engineered that plan nothing in terms of personal loss.

. . .

The people who brought America reports of WMDs when none existed, and the slogan "Mission Accomplished" when it was not nor likely to be, now say that American troops cannot leave. Not yet. Not soon. Not on a timetable. Judge the truth of that conclusion by the truth of their past statements. They say that talk of withdrawal shows a lack of support for the troops. There is no better way to support those who have fought valiantly in Iraq than to guarantee that not one more of them dies in the service of the political miscalculation of their leaders. Not one more soldier. Not one more grave. Not one more day. Bring them home tomorrow.

Amen. Would that the Lord would send more such prophets.