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The only solution is the Iraq Exit Strategy backed by Joe Biden, Michael Savage and Sam Brownback.

‘Let Iraqis kill each other,’ [Iraq] Catholic bishop says, calling for U.S. withdrawal


The Catholic News Service reported Chaldean Catholic Bishop Ibrahim N. Ibrahim said: "'Let the Iraqis kill each other, but let the occupying power get out, because they are not killing each other because they are Sunni or Shiite, but because they are with the Americans or against the Americans.'"

"'Things are worse and worse and worse every single day, even for the Americans. The best thing is to withdraw, and then let the brothers attack each other,' [Iraq] Bishop Ibrahim said."

"U.S. troops should at least withdraw from the cities, and he believes the warring factions would eventually reach some sort of power-sharing arrangement."
(See the whole article below by the Catholic News Service)

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I agree. The only solution is the Iraq Exit Strategy backed by Joe Biden, Michael Savage and Sam Brownback. The strategy they back is Peter Galbraith's exist plan.

I finished “STATE OF DENIAL” and the most important disclosure was of the book was that Bush has no “exit strategy” in Iraq.

Even an ex-aide to Donald Rumsfeld said the only Iraq expert with a "viable" exist plan is Galbraith.

Steve Herbits, long time friend and advisor of Donald Rumsfeld, presented the plan to Rumsfeld. Herbits frankly stated “"It is an exit strategy," Herbits told the secretary, and the administration frankly did not have a viable one” according to “STATE OF DENIAL.”

The only major public figures to support the Galbraith plan are Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, conservative talk show host Michael Savage and Republican presidential candidate Sam Brownback.

Biden, in the article below explained, why Bush’s plan is failing and again offers the Galbraith plan which in my opinion is the most reasonable strategy that might work. That is given the fact that the vast majority of the American people want the US military out of Iraq as soon as possible.

The plan is to divide the country into three states for the three main ethnic groups in Iraq. Send the US Army to the safe Kurd state. Allow each group to govern their own state. If chaos comes about the US army can go briefly to the Sunni or Shiite state and restore order then return to the safe haven of the Kurd state.

With this plan the army can eventually reduce the number of units. Eventually only a small presence will remain in the safe Kurd state.



An effective Iraq strategy may exist, but the president hasn't found it yet
By Joe Biden
San Jose Mercury News
Article Launched:04/13/2007 01:33:05 AM PDT

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., is right to warn about the consequences of failure in Iraq. But he is fundamentally wrong when he argues that those potential consequences require us to stick with a failing strategy.

It is precisely because the stakes are so great that we must change course in Iraq, now.

McCain wrote that the president's strategy is beginning to show results but that most Americans don't know it because the media cover the bad news, not the good news. Of course, reporting any news in Iraq is an extraordinary act of bravery, given the dangers journalists must navigate every day. But the fact is, virtually every "welcome development" McCain cited has been reported, including the purported anti-Al-Qaida alliance with Sunni sheiks in Al-Anbar, the establishment of joint U.S.-Iraqi security stations in Baghdad and the decision by Muqtada al-Sadr to go to ground - for now.

The problem is that for every welcome development, there is an equally or even more unwelcome development that gives the lie to the claim that we are making progress. For example:

While violence against Iraqis is down in some Baghdad neighborhoods where we have "surged" forces, it is up dramatically in the belt ringing Baghdad. The civilian death toll increased 15 percent from February to March. Essentially, when we squeeze the water balloon in one place it bulges somewhere else.

It is true that Sadr has not been seen, but he has been heard, rallying his followers with anti-American messages and encouraging his thugs to take on U.S. troops in the south. Intelligence experts believe his militia are simply waiting out the surge.

Closing markets to vehicles has precluded some car bombs, but it also has prompted terrorists to change tactics and walk in with suicide vests. The road from the airport to Baghdad may be safer, but the skies above it are more lethal - witness the ironic imposition of "no-fly zones" for our own helicopters.

The most damning evidence that the "results" McCain cites are illusory is the city of Tal Afar. Architects of the president's plan called it a model because in 2005, a surge of about 10,000 Americans and Iraqis pacified the city. Then we left Tal Afar, just as our troops soon will leave the Baghdad neighborhoods that they have calmed.

This month, Tal Afar was the scene of some of the most horrific sectarian violence to date: A massive truck bomb aimed at the Shiite community led to a retaliatory rampage by Shiite death squads, aided by the Iraqi police. Hundreds were killed. The population of Tal Afar, 200,000 a few years ago, is down to 80,000.

There is an even more basic problem with McCain's progress report, and it goes to the heart of the choice we face in Iraq. Whatever tactical progress we may be making will amount to nothing if it is not serving a larger strategy for success. Alas, the administration's strategy has virtually no prospects for success.

The administration hopes the surge will buy time for Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government to broker the sustainable political settlement our military views as essential to lasting stability in Iraq.

But there is no trust within the government, no trust of the government by the people it purports to serve and no capacity on the part of the government to deliver security or services. There is little prospect that the government will build that trust and capacity anytime soon.

In short, the most basic premise of the president's approach - that Iraqis will rally behind a strong central government that looks out for their interests equitably - is fundamentally and fatally flawed.

If the president's plan won't work, what will? History suggests only four other ways to keep together a country riven by sectarian strife:

We allow or help one side to win, which would require years of horrific bloodletting.

We perpetuate the occupation, which is impossible politically and practically.

We promote the return of a dictator, who is not on the horizon but whose emergence would be the cruelest of ironies.

Or we help Iraq make the transition to a decentralized, federal system, as called for in its constitution, where each major group has local control over the fabric of its daily life, including security, education, religion and marriage.

Making federalism work for all Iraqis is a strategy that can still succeed and allow our troops to leave responsibly. It's a strategy I have been promoting for a year.

I cannot guarantee that my plan for Iraq (detailed at www.planforiraq.com) will work. But I can guarantee that the course we're on - the course that a man I admire, John McCain, urges us to continue - is a road to nowhere.

[http://www.mercurynews.com/search/ci_5657638]

Bob Woodard in “STATE OF DENIAL” on page 481 wrote:

Steve Herbits [ a long time friend and advisor of Rumsfeld] went to have a sandwich with Rumsfeld at the Pentagon on Wednesday, June 14. The most important op-ed piece of the year, Herbits told him, was probably the one in The New York Times the previous month by Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Delaware Democrat and ranking member of the ;enate Foreign Relations Committee, and Les Gelb, the former presi-;ent of the Council on Foreign Relations. Rumsfeld began taking notes.

Biden and Gelb had proposed an option between staying the course definitely and bringing the U.S. troops home on some kind of timetable, Herbits noted. This would be done by establishing three largely autonomous regions, one each for the Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis, who would make their own domestic laws and be responsible for security in their regions. The central government in Baghdad would control border security, foreign affairs and oil revenues. Iraq was already heading toward partition and this loose federalism of three ethnic states was developing on its own.

Herbits said that the current concept of an integrated national police is not working at all, and the sectarian militias were increasingly powerful and violent. Tens of thousands of Iraqis were migrating on their own to their ethnic regions already, he said, and the voting by foot was more important than any of the highly touted elections. Events were already taking Iraq in this direction and it might be impossible to stop. U.S. policy could effectively embrace it. This, he noted, was the conclusion in a forthcoming book by Peter W. Galbraith, an expert with two decades of experience with Iraq, called The End of Iraq.

Rumsfeld continued to take notes, expressing neither agreement nor disagreement. Set up an A Team and a B Team on the possibility, Herbits proposed. Have each give you a 30-minute argument so you become familiar with the language and issues on each side because it was likely to become the focus of debate.

"It is an exit strategy," Herbits told the secretary, and the administration frankly did not have a viable one. "It would be something this administration could adopt in the name of freedom and self determination. And they could call it victory."

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‘Let Iraqis kill each other,’ Catholic bishop says, calling for U.S. withdrawal
By Robert Delaney
6/27/2007
Catholic News Service (www.catholicnews.com)

DETROIT, Mich. (CNS) – U.S. troops should withdraw and let Iraqi factions fight it out, the bishop for most Iraqi Catholics in the United States said June 19.


CHALDEAN BISHOP CALLS FOR U.S. WITHDRAWAL FROM IRAQ – Bishop Ibrahim N. Ibrahim of the Chaldean Eparchy of St. Thomas the Apostle, based in Southfield, Mich., calls for U.S. withdrawal from Iraq during his June 19 sermon at Mother of God (Chaldean) Cathedral in Southfield. The eparchy serves Chaldean Catholics in the eastern United States. (CNS/Michigan Catholic)

"Let the Iraqis kill each other, but let the occupying power get out, because they are not killing each other because they are Sunni or Shiite, but because they are with the Americans or against the Americans," said Chaldean Catholic Bishop Ibrahim N. Ibrahim.

The head of the Eparchy of St. Thomas the Apostle made the comments in an impassioned sermon at a special Mass at Mother of God (Chaldean) Cathedral in the Detroit suburb of Southfield, where the eparchy has its headquarters.

The Mass, which drew close to 1,000 people, was celebrated to memorialize recently slain Chaldean Father Ragheed Aziz Ganni and the three subdeacons who were killed with him, as well as to pray for all those who have died in the fighting in Iraq, including U.S. troops, and for the safety of Iraq's remaining Christians.

Bishop Ibrahim said the situation of Christians in Baghdad, Iraq's capital, "is very, very bad," with Islamic terrorists threatening that they must convert to Islam or pay a special tax as protection money.

Even if they choose to leave, they are being threatened to leave any unmarried daughters behind so they can be taken as wives by Muslims and forced to convert to Islam, the bishop said.

But Bishop Ibrahim said he does not believe the Muslims killing and threatening Christians are from either of Iraq's two Muslim groupings – Shiites or Sunnis – but rather al-Qaida terrorists from outside Iraq.

The bishop spoke in Arabic at the Mass, but later provided an English translation of his major points.

"For a Christian to be killed in the Middle East is nothing new – it often happened in the second, third and fourth centuries that Christians were martyred for their faith – but for Christians to be killed in the 21st century, when the world's major superpower has 150,000 troops in that country, is a terrible thing," he said. "Why are they there if they cannot defend human life and human rights?"

Bishop Ibrahim said U.S. troops should at least withdraw from the cities, and he believes the warring factions would eventually reach some sort of power-sharing arrangement.

The current situation puts Christians in the hazardous position of being perceived as being allied with the foreign occupiers, but the Americans provide no special protection for them, the bishop continued.

"We do not have weapons, we do not have a militia, and nobody is supporting us," he said.

And even with some of the additional troops from the planned surge in U.S. forces already in place, there is no security in Baghdad, he noted.

"Things are worse and worse and worse every single day, even for the Americans. The best thing is to withdraw, and then let the brothers attack each other," Bishop Ibrahim said.

When Father Ganni and the three subdeacons were killed June 3 by men wearing masks after leaving a church in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul following Mass, the police did not even come to investigate, Bishop Ibrahim said. "Their bodies lay on the streets for two hours after they were killed."

The bishop said he was about 30 miles from Mosul when the four men were slain.

The best hope for improving the situation in Iraq would probably be for troops from other Arab countries under the auspices of the United Nations to be sent in to replace withdrawing U.S. forces, in Bishop Ibrahim's view.

Remon Samir Jiddou, parish council vice president at Mother of God, said there is not much fellow Chaldeans back in Iraq can do about the dangers they now face. "It's out of our hands; that's why we pray to God. All we have is our faith in God, that he will protect us."
Parishioner Ferial Kishmesh said, "I'm praying for all Iraqis – whether Christian or Muslim. We're all brothers and sisters."

Most Iraqi Christians – both in Iraq and in the United States – are Chaldean Catholics, ethnic Assyrians whose church has been in union with Rome since the 16th century. Smaller groupings of Iraqi Christians include members of the Ancient Assyrian Church of the East, from which the Chaldeans split, and Syriac Catholics.

The Southfield-based Eparchy of St. Thomas the Apostle is the diocese for Chaldean Catholics living in approximately the eastern half of the United States. Of about 160,000 Chaldeans in the U.S., about 120,000 are in the eparchy, with some 110,000 of them living in metropolitan Detroit.

Bishop Ibrahim said about 120,000 Chaldeans still live in their traditional villages in the north of Iraq or in northern cities such as Mosul, while perhaps 250,000 live in Baghdad. Chaldeans have been leaving Iraq for years, and even more would like to, he said.

"If they have money and the means and a passport, they want to get out," the bishop added.


- - -

Copyright (c) 2007 Catholic News Service/U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops

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