The Report

The Iraq Surrender Group has released its much heralded report. The worst part of the report:

Diplomatic efforts ...should seek to persuade Iran that it should take specific steps to improve the situation in Iraq

As Milblogger T. F. Boggs puts it:

Baker and Hamilton want us to get terrorists supporting countries involved in fighting terrorism!

Anyone who reads my blog knows where I stand on dialog with Iran, a country that I feel is at war with us. Nevertheless suppose we do give Iran enough to get them to agree to back off in Iraq. What have we gained? Ahmadinejad has already stated:

Iran will stand by its neighbor Iraq to help the country boost security and achieve peace.

Don’t we believe him? If not, why would we believe him anytime in the future?

One thing that permeates the report is the disdain the authors seem to have for the military. Sgt. Boggs saw it.

Not only are the findings of the ISG a joke but the people who led the group (Baker and Hamilton) treat soldiers like they are a joke.

What the group desperately needed was at least one their members to have been in the military and had recent experience in Iraq.

You would think a commission looking to make recommendations on how to move forward in a military conflict would include a few Generals much less someone familiar with the conflict. However the assertions from the MSM that this was a repudiation of Bush’s policy seemed to have missed a few of the reports good points.

[W]e believe it would be wrong for the United States to abandon [Iraq] through a precipitate withdrawal of troops and support. A premature American departure from Iraq would almost certainly produce greater sectarian violence and further deterioration of conditions.

We agree with the goal of U.S. policy as stated by the president: an Iraq that can ‘govern itself, sustain itself, and defend itself.’

Seems more of a repudiation of the cut and run crowd. I’ll leave you with one more quote from the Sergeant’s great post.

War sucks but a world run by Islamofacists sucks more.