Everybody check out this article in the Times.
CAMP FALLUJA, Iraq, July 6 - American and Iraqi officials say that a decision in April to pull back American forces from Falluja inadvertently created a safe haven for terrorists and insurgents there. But officials are reluctant to send American troops back into the city for fear of touching off another uprising.
The officials say they are unsure how to proceed, but agree they merely postponed the problem when the Americans halted an attack in April, brokering a deal to keep Americans out of Falluja and allow local Iraqis to police the city instead.
Iraqi and American officials say they would prefer to re-enter the city with a sizable force of Iraqi soldiers, perhaps backed up by Americans. But they concede that an Iraqi force capable of mounting an effective assault on Falluja, a city of 250,000 people, is months or even years away.
"Postponed the problem?" So, in other words, we handed over Iragi sovereignty to meet an arbitrary deadline while a major objective in the War on Terror still lies ahead of us - one the Iraqis cannot handle on their own and one the U.S. isn't looking forward to addressing because it doubts it can handle it without a major uprising?
I think it's safe to say that a government isn't truly sovereign if it can't secure its own territory. George W. Bush has made it clear that our enemies are countries that foster terrorism or provide safe haven for them. What's Fallujah, then? Iraqi sovereignty doesn't do the U.S. a lick of good if there's an entire city of 250,000 people where lawlessness reigns and where terrorists can operate safely.
So we went in, snagged the "bad guy" (Saddam Hussein's regime) whose connection to 9/11 terrorists is questionable, turned over sovereignty and left behind what G.W. has been saying all along is the real enemy - terrorists.
If G.W. wants to have any credibility at all vis-a-vis the War on Terror, he had better align his actions with his words.
