File this under “Things Known for Years by Those Paying Attention”:

Since the signing of the 2009 Security Agreement, we are guests in Iraq, and after six years in Iraq, we now smell bad to the Iraqi nose.

Those are the words of Col. Timothy Reese, a U.S. adviser to the Iraqi military, in the rarest of communications — a soldier suggesting that he and his colleagues should actually withdraw.

Pundits like Larison and Bacevich have been saying this for years; the former a “paleoconservative” and the latter a military expert of the realist school. And their overarching premise has been this: American pols have never undertaken to understand Mesopotamia, have little if any understanding of what drives these people, and can never be a real agent of change there as long as the goal is something as romantic as “liberation” or “democracy.”

Iraq never attacked us, and in fact does not play any sort of strategic role in the region; all along its borders are our allies, places with no organized ill intent toward us or any real ability to mount an offensive. It’s time to leave, and in fact it was never time to arrive.

Tags: Iraq

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 30th, 2009 at 8.18 pm and is filed under politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.