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24 Feb 2009 11:27 am

Barack W.

Thomas Ricks worries:

It seems to me that by vowing to get out of Iraq in 16 months, President Obama is not departing from the mistakes of George Bush, but repeating them. That is, Bush was persistently overoptimistic about Iraq. His original war plan assumed that the United States would get down to 30,000 troops in Iraq by the fall of 2003. Instead, here we are more than five years later with more than four times that number of troops mired in Iraq. I hope we can stop planning for Iraq only on best-case assumptions.

I echo Ricks' point. The assumption that somehow the Iraq war is over seems very cocky and premature to me. I still do not see how we can disengage meaningfully without triggering a sectarian blood-bath. The surge, in retrospect, my come to be seen as the moment that the Iraq imperial venture became part of our lives and a drain on our wallets for ever. You watch what happens if Obama actually does what he has promised. Empire has its vested interests - and they will resist.

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