Tuesday, February 24, 2009

US troops coming home, or going somewhere else

Obama is set to announce this week -- maybe even during tonight's address to Congress -- that America will pull out combat troops out of Iraq by August 2010, about three months longer than he said he would have liked to during the campaign. This would leave about 30,000 or so "advisors" who are in any case scheduled to depart by December 2011.

Good news but the fact is the troops never should have been there in the first places. There were many ways to remove Mr. Hussein from power that would not have involved such a massive and reckless military operation that has cost so much that America now has to go cap in hand just to run the day to day operations of the government. And there are so many places in America that need to be guarded, chemical plants, ports and places of commerce -- places that could have benen protected without having to violate posse comitatus.

Imagine if the trillion dollars spent in Mesopotamia had instead been spent building infrastructure in the States ... but alas, hindsight is, well you know. And in any case many of those troops are going to be redeployed to Afghanistan which is becoming an increasingly hopeless campaign.

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