The Fall of Baghdad

History will record an astounding number of “Bushisms”. Among the most memorable so far include "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job," and “Bring ‘em on.” The President has begun anther that my hunt him more and result in greater misery for America and the Middle East. The President and his representatives dismissed the idea of withdrawing from Iraq in anticipation of the Iraq Study Group report. On December 5, 2006, after meeting with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, the president angrily asserted, "This business about graceful exit just simply has no realism to it at all."

Bush, I am sure, never intended the bold truth of the statement. I think he meant to say that he did not intend to leave Iraq until, as he puts it, the job gets done. As time passes there really is no graceful exit from Iraq. Our exit will be bloody, painful, and devastating or the entire world, whenever we finally leave.

Too bad that the president refuses to consider the “graceful exit” that America’s elder statesmen have presented him with the Iraq Study Group Report. Bush does not seem to realize what political cover the group offers. Truly surprising from a White House that sees every issue from a "political" angle.

The exit will come. Americans old enough remember watching the CIA Air America helicopter evacuate people from the roof of our embassy in Saigon. An image seared into our national psyche. We tend to view that scene as the end of the Viet Nam war.

But for an untold number of Vietnamese, some estimates nearing one million, the aftermath of the American departure meant “reeducation” and death. Military planners under the code name “Frequent Wind” managed to evacuate a minuscule number of indigenous personnel along with the US staff in Saigon.

I hope that American planners include accounting for the Iraqis that have visibly supported our troops. The translators, workers, and local leaders who have actively taken up our cause will surly die in a precipitous American withdrawal. The anarchy in Iraq does not even seem as controlled as the fall of Saigon. At least in Viet Nam there were “sides” in the Viet Cong, the North Vietnamese and the Republic of Vietnam.