by Zach Bigalke

Created on: June 08, 2007

To effectively and pragmatically enact any decision, it is essential to have a long-term plan and goals to help guide the specific mission. To go into something as absurdly violent and demanding as a war zone without any idea about when and where troops should be stationed, how long tours of duty will last, and just what the overall mission is attempting to reasonably accomplish is a terrible mistake. Setting a timetable for troop withdrawal from Iraq is simply prudent planning.

We cannot be at war forever. Eventually, soldiers will begin to make progressively greater and more-detrimental mistakes as they spend longer periods of time on the front lines with fewer and shorter periods of rest and recuperation with family and friends. Many soldiers are serving second, third, even fourth and fifth tours of duty in the Fertile Crescent. Meanwhile, the situation as a whole progressively worsens. Reconstruction projects continue to fail as the monies for them are siphoned for corporate profit. The only thing on which Shiite and Sunni Iraqis can agree is that they are fed up with American occupation and militancy in the region. Every new soldier sent to the war zone creates another insurgent to fight him; every soldier returned to his home tempers those inflamatory passions.

President Bush has repeatedly received his rubber-stamp approval for his warmongering from a Republican Congress more intent on pleasing their leader than the American public. Now that there is a legislature with a majority party other than that of the executive branch, the time has come to either fish or cut bait. Benchmarks and timetables do not mean that we are "for the terrorists", as Bush would have the populace believe. This is sound military planning, devoid of the personal conundrum and open-ended commitment Bush has in trying to finish his daddy's war...and make the Benjamins for his cronies.

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