Majority of Americans Want Out of Iraq

On Iraq, most Americans do not agree with Commander Guy. Here's the latest poll from CNN:

A majority of the U.S. public disapproves of President Bush's decision to veto a war spending bill that called for U.S. troops to leave Iraq in 2008, according to a CNN poll released Tuesday.

The poll found that 54 percent of Americans opposed Bush's May 1 veto, while 44 percent backed the president's decision to kill the $124 billion bill.

Now that the veto has been cast, 57 percent of Americans said they want Congress to send another spending bill with a timetable for withdrawal back to the White House, the poll found -- but 61 percent would support a new bill that dropped the timetables in favor of benchmarks for the Iraqi government to meet to maintain American support.

What I want to know is why 44% still support a president whose Iraq policy is simply to kick the can down the road for the next president to deal with? Other than that, President Bush has no Iraq policy worthy of the name. We have turned ourselves into an unpopular occupation army in the middle of a civil war without an identifiable goal beyond not being shot at when we patrol a very unhappy and dysfunctional country that we never much thought about before Bush launched an invasion we did not need.

A war should have a realistic and meaningful goal. Bush never explained why (at least not accurately or honestly) we're there beyond his fiction created long after the start of the war that we're there so that the magical they do not come here. Bush can't even define who this magical they happens to be. Leaving war to an incompetent like Bush is also not acceptable. The 44% who think Bush was right to veto the Iraq bill need to get more realistic about what's happening. With the world's most powerful military, wars should not take four or five years to fight. And we should not be in the business of acquiring colonies or behave like we own Iraq which is how much of the world sees our presence in Iraq.

We need to wind the war down and think long and hard about what our military is for and why it should ever be used when there is no imminent threat. I believe in a strong defense but it makes no sense to go to war without an understandable policy or an acceptable and worthwhile goal. Relying on Bush's 'gut instinct' was a poor way to go. Congress needs to get Bush to wind down the war and wind down his strange and very costly ambitions.