Reid: Finish The Job NOW!

In the wake of the veto threat from President Bush of the emergency supplemental bill that includes a withdrawal date, Senator Majority Leader Harry Reid now says he will support completely cutting funds for the war after March 31, 2008. That gives the president eleven and a half months to tell the Iraqi government to get its goddamn act together.

Sure, Iran and Al-Qaeda will claim victory if we end the war now, but they've already won. They won when Saddam fell. They won when botched this entire war. We won when the Republican Congress refused to ask tough questions about the war and when President Bush refused to get rid of those who screwed this war up. Iran always had influence in Iraq, the only other country in the Muslim world with a Shiite majority. We could pretend like everything is going fine, hide from reality, force everyone into an ultra-nationalist "we can never be defeated" view of the world and stay the course like it's going to do anything, or we can accept the reality of the situation, that our leadership has screwed up this war so badly it's beyond fixable, get out with the best face we can and stare down Iran by putting our military back together, putting our country back together (with new leadership next year,) and learn from our mistakes.

What happened in Iraq sucked, it sucks that it ended this way. It sucks that we screwed this up, but it's nobody's fault but this administration. It's nobody else's fault. Personally, I am inclined to let the Bush administration continue down their dead end road for the rest of their time in power, then let new leadership next year fix the problem and show what a failure this administration was, but this mistake is not worth one more American life. The longer we stay there and fight for everyone else, the stronger Iran gets, the more they can prowl around the Persian Gulf with nobody countering their power. The more they can develop nukes and threaten people, with no one to stop them. The longer we referee Iraq, the more the Taliban gains power in Afghanistan, the stronger Al-Qaeda gets thanks to the fact we have, at least in words only, proved their point.

It is time for us to admit this mistake, admit reality, and move on. We must keep strong and keep the faith in America, cause it won't be long before we have to take on Iran, a much larger, much more powerful country, and when we did, we CANNOT screw that up too.