Rich Joins the Chorus to Bring the Troops Home

Normally when I link to a public reprint of Frank Rich's Sunday column, I quote from somewhere in the middle. I hope you'll go and click through the link to read the full thing for yourself and to experience his arguments first hand. Today, though, I've got to cut right to the chase for the piece he titles "Supporting Our Troops Over a Cliff" and quote his final couple of paragraphs. Go and read the whole thing anyway (made available today through the auspices of The Peking Duck), but here's what you should see if you don't.

For all the politicians' talk about honoring those who serve, Washington's record is derelict: chronic shortages in body and Humvee armor; a back-door draft forcing troops with expired contracts into repeated deployments; inadequate postwar health care and veterans' benefits. And that's just the short list. Now a war without end is running off the rails and putting an undermanned army in still greater jeopardy. "Today, the Americans are just one more militia lost in the anarchy," Nir Rosen, who has covered Iraq since the invasion, wrote in The Washington Post last weekend.

We can't pretend we don't know this is happening. It's happening in broad daylight. We know that "as the Iraqis stand up, we'll stand down" is fiction, not reality. We know from the Pentagon's own report to Congress last week that attacks on Americans and Iraqis alike are at their highest since American commanders started keeping count in 2004. We know that even as coalition partners like Italy and South Korea bail out, we are planning an indefinite stay of undefined parameters: the 104-acre embassy complex rising in the Green Zone is the largest in the world, and the Decider himself has said that it's up to "future presidents and future governments of Iraq" to decide our exit strategy.

Actually, the current government of Iraq already is. On Thursday the latest American-backed Iraqi prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, whom Mr. Bush is "proud to call" his "ally and friend," invited open warfare on American forces by accusing them of conducting Haditha-like killing sprees against civilians as a "regular" phenomenon. If this is the ally and friend we are fighting for, a country that truly supports the troops has no choice but to start bringing them home.

He also disses the Prez's big push tomorrow for the anti-gay marriage amendment, making the obvious point that, whether you support it or not, you have to admit that it's not exactly one of the most pressing issues we're facing at the moment.