Interetingly enough, Carter's National Security Advisor was on the radio today saying we could stabilize the region with 500,000 troops on the ground, but that isn't feasible, and so we should get out, as anything less is causing further destabilization, with more and more Iraqis "resenting American occupation".
Apparently, it's something he's been saying for about a month, and I think these Senators are pretty much just echoing him.
http://www.ww4report.com/node/1743
Quote:
Brzezinski said that however long the U.S. military occupation of Iraq lasted, it was doomed to failure.
"In a war of attrition," he said, "a foreign occupier is always at a disadvantage. This is a failed occupation."
Brzezinski said Iraq had not yet collapsed into a full-scale civil war. Far from preventing such a war from breaking out, he said, the continued U.S. military occupation made one far more likely.
"This is not yet a civil war, in the sense that it is not yet a comprehensive, nation-wide collision between Shiites and Sunnis but we are unintentionally feeding it," he said.
Brzezinski suggested that the United States "ask Iraqi leaders to ask us to leave" and suggested that those Iraqi politicians who have expressed a desire for American forces to continue the occupation are exercising poor leadership.
"We are acting as though the Iraqis are our colonial wards," he said. "We are teaching them about democracy by arresting them, bombing them, by humiliating them and also helping them. It is an ambivalent course in democracy."
Brzezinski also said the president had failed to provide any serious national leadership to back up his commitment to the Iraq war and had failed to call the American people to the spirit of duty and sacrifice needed to win any real war.
"What bothers me is the packaging," Brzezinski said. He said that if the United States were truly engaged in war, then there would need to for a national mobilization involving a tax on the rich, an overall war tax and a draft. "These actions," he said, "are the basic consequences of serious engagement."
Brzezinski also hit out at President George W. Bush's newly released National Security Strategy. He called it "an erroneous version of reality."
Brzezinski urged Bush to widen his circle of advisors. "Words have consequences," he said. "The deliberate misuse of words can be dangerous and a fundamentally altered version of reality can lead to a fear-driven nation."
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