There’s No Point
Len at Dark Bilious Vapors has a common sense article on troop withdrawal from Iraq written by Lieutenant General William E. Odom US Army [retired] who was DirNSA [Director of the National Security Agency] during the Reagan administration.
NSA is a joint services Defense agency, and I was part of it. We gathered and analyzed intelligence, which is very definitely a “really-based” business.
As General Odom points out the situation in Iraq with us there is already as bad as it would have gotten if we had left after deposing Saddam, so there’s really no point in being targets. More men and materiel are not going to make a difference at this point; we should cut our losses and leave.
We lost the peace when the decision was made to replace Jay Garner with Paul Bremer. Bremer exercised no oversight over anything and the situation spiraled out of control.
