Let's blow this joint!

I read with horror Jon Lee Anderson's fantastic piece on Iraq's president, Jalal Talabani, on last week's New Yorker. I think this piece should be required reading for all members of Congress, if not for the entire nation. Cheney and Bush should be forced to read it every single minute of their offensive lives.
Basically, it is a portrait of a situation that is simply not worth fighting for, let alone shedding the blood of young Americans. I will give you just 2 examples that appear in the article that will make your blood curl:

Mr. Talabani's bill at the Hotel Meurice in Paris came to "more than half a million dollars. (Talabani's suite alone cost thirteen thousand dollars a night.)"

And that doesn't include his shopping. Not like Iraq is Qatar, if you know what I mean.

Then there are lengthy descriptions of the absolute chaos, rampant corruption and byzantine political backstabbing going on in that hellhole. The people who rule (or rather misrule) Iraq right now are all related to one another, they live in the former Saddam palaces and they spend millions of dollars a day while innocents are blown up in the streets and while Americans are wasting their lives over there.

But this was the clincher. Former Prime Minister Allawi:

"accused people within the Interior Ministry of killing some of his associates; a few days earlier, his chief of security in Baghdad had been tortured to death. "His eyes were taken out and his body was dumped on the street," Allawi said. "And this is the government doing it."

After you read this sentence, you want to bring the troops home in the next five minutes and let this bunch of thieves and criminals continue killing themselves. Instead of watching the stupid Superbowl, the American people would do well to demand to bring the troops back home NOW.

I know I will be accused of naivete. Now it turns out that because of our own unbelievable incompetence and arrogance and stupidity, the entire region stands to be swallowed by Iran. I don't care. If and when Iran misbehaves, there will be ways of dealing with it. As of now, Iraq is a mess that we created and that will not get any less messy if we stay there, if we surge there, or whatever. Given who these people are and what they are used to, it will only get worse.
Let's get out of there.