I'll be on the phone urging my Representative, Jim Cooper, and my Senators, Lamar Alexander and Bob Corker, to support this legislation. I don't have much hope for Alexander and Corker, though. See if you can talk some sense into them!

Sen Feingold's article does not address the most important issue concerning withdrawal: What Colin Powell called the "Pottery Barn Rule." I was opposed to the invasion from the beginning, not because I forsaw the internecine violence that would be unleashed, but because I didn't want the US to be responsible for fixing such a screwed-up mess of a country. But now that we broke it, don't we have a responsiblilty to leave it in a reasonable condition? I don't know how to do that, but we can't just say that it was W's screw up so we're just going to leave now and let the chips (and bodies) fall where they may.

But if after breaking something in the store, the employees at Pottery Barn start to fight over the pieces, what then? If half of them think you should use Elmer's glue it back together, and half of them think you should use SuperGlue, and they are willing to kill each other over something as silly as how you glue together a broken dinner plate....

Then it's time to leave go buy your flatware at Williams Sonoma instead.

Williams-Sonoma and Pottern Barn are the same company - was your post a sly reference to Iran (the next place we might go "shopping"), or just a bout of serendipity?

But now that we broke it, don't we have a responsiblilty to leave it in a reasonable condition?

When you break the pottery, you don't fix it: you pay for it. Nobody fixes it. The shards get swept up by a minimum-wage employee and tossed into the garbage.

We can still provide monetary assistance to the "democratically elected" government of Iraq. We can still ships arms to them and line the pockets of Cheney's cronies. President Bush could even claim "victory," having ousted Saddam and established "democracy" in Iraq. (If we really care, we can slice into the billion-dollar pie given to Israel every year.)

What we don't have to do is keep dying and killing for a mistake.

Dear Senator Feingold,

Thank you for your efforts in constructing a Senate bill with Senator Reid using the power of the purse to halt America's immoral and bad behavior in Iraq. Speaking truth to our elected officials is my job as an ordinary citizen. My job is to speak from my conscience.

You say "Our new legislation, which will be officially introduced next Tuesday, April 10th, uses Congress's constitutional 'power of the purse' authority to safely redeploy our troops from Iraq by March 31, 2008."

Truthfully speaking, I interpret this as empty rhetoric because the language is only about meeting deadlines for U.S. troop redeployment (not withdrawal) coupled with 4 exceptions for not proceeding with redeployment. It totally and completely ignores the immoral actions America is doing and the immoral conditions we created and continue to create.

In 2002, we didn’t know America manipulated intelligence to justify the invasion of Iraq. We didn’t know the American government tortures prisoners, funds worldwide kidnapping, and a gulag of secret prisons around the world. The American public didn’t know US tax dollars fills the pockets of international combat mercenaries who operate in Iraq under no rule of law while US troops are ill-equipped and improperly trained for their mission.

But today, American citizens and the whole world knows this is what America does. By any standard, this is immoral and bad behavior. Moral outrage about the killing and violence in Iraq drove ordinary citizens to the polls in November. The American public wants this bad behavior to stop. They want their men and women home this year and to have care when they return. What will it take for Congress, through the power of the purse strings to halt funding immoral activities?

how many more lives they are willing to sacrifice

how many more suicides at home must occur

how many more cases of spousal abuse at home must happen

how many more Walter Reed fiascos must there be

before they stop funding the occupation, killing and violence?

As an ordinary citizen, I feel the language in the bill improves significantly when one adds these substantive metrics to decide how much longer people must suffer. By ignoring the real and substantive issues, Democrats and Republicans discount the pain and suffering of American and Iraqi families and trivialize the moral outrage of ordinary citizens. By their actions, they appear to lack the courage and confidence to lay out the important and substantive metrics that the majority of ordinary citizens are demanding.

It doesn't take a brave and strong person to vote for more killing and violence when you have no answers to these moral questions. Ignoring the moral issues gives the administration a field day to criticize arbitrary deadlines and milestones. It gives the administration an open door to play on peoples’ fear of hurt and harm.

As any parent knows, when their child misbehaves, continuing or increasing their allowances and privileges only rewards their bad behavior.

peace,

jbkim

The only option with any chance of winning this war, although unlikely to be successful now (it's too late) would have been to follow the advice of the generals who were fired early on... at least 450,000 troops, lock Iraq down with US military on every street in every city, enough troops to clear the insurgents out of each area of the country and then stay there to KEEP THEM OUT (no more whack-a-mole), and massive tax increases to support the war effort. The fact is, the Bushies are the ones who don't want to push for what it would take to win in Iraq. They don't have the courage to propose the military draft and tax increases needed to allow for enough troops to get what they SAID was their aim accomplished. Their current policies are doomed to failure as the generals they fired tried to tell them. But then, perhaps that was never their aim at all... Perhaps Bush, Cheney and all their oil company cronies are just secretly sitting back and laughing (ala the little skit a couple of years ago for the Washington Correspondent's dinner where Bush was looking around the oval office for WMD's - they actually thought that was funny, folks!). The unrest they've managed to create in the Middle East has led to huge increases in the price of oil and huge increases in the propfits of the companies they'll report back to as soon as they're out of office. The truth is, we'll never have enough troops in Iraq to nail it down, consequently, when we leave we'll leave chaos in our wake, whether we leave at midnight tonight or ten years from now. By the style of their own societal traditions, these folks, the Sunni's and the Shiites, need to violently fight this out between themselves. It will be bloody. It's always been bloody. They will kill until they grow tired of killing. The longer we try to keep the lid on, the more our finest young men and women die or are maimed in the cross fire to no good purpose, ordered into harm's way by chickenhawks who are such wimps that they avoided the military as if service to their country were the black plague. The sooner we leave, the sooner all that ends. The chaos that ensues won't be much different than what the average Iraqi is currently experiening. Remember, they have to live on those streets where our journalists and politicians don't dare walk without on the ground and helicopter military support. (In case you hadn't noticed, regular Iraqi's are currently fleeing the country by the millions at great personal risk.) The sad thing is, it doesn't matter who wins, they'll hate us. Nice Job, Bushies/Neocons! You took a difficult situation, made it impossible and left us with a mess that will haunt us for the next 100 years (not counting our own budget deficit). We're taking this decision out of your ignorant, incompetent, selfish, self-serving, stubborn, war profiteering hands.