"3:10 to Baghdad"

In a recent movie release, "3:10 to Yuma", the plot presented is that Ben Wade, a savvy and ruthless criminal of the Old West, is captured by a posse. An ex-Union Army soldier and failing farmer in the posse tries to turn him over to a special train that will take him to a certain hanging for his bloody, anarchic misdeeds. Complications ensue.

Reading the plot of this upcoming Horse Opera reminds me of the situation American policy makers have on their hands in Iraq. It one thing to capture a dangerous entity, like a wanted killer (or a failed nation-state torn by ethnic, intra-religious, and crinimal gangs) and another to finish up the job and get the Desperado (or war-torn country) on the train and off the hands of the overtaxed forces trying to be let loose of its dangerous assignment.

Call me just another "left wing Kool Aid drinker", but I think this game of good news--bad news in Iraq with the Bush Administration and the fawning media pundits on the editorial Right of the American Political Spectrum is getting old. O nthe one hand, we hear, "progress is being made" in one central province like Anbar and then on other reports we read that of course the government is corrupt and the military is unreliable and the prime minister is ineffectual and of course we can't expect to leave and our freedom is at stake and so on and so on. It would "embolden the terrorists if we leave" anytime before...whenever...so we have to keep rotating the same men and women back inthere and finish the job and we don't need a draft or anything but things are desperate and al-Queda is on the march and yada-yada-yada.

Does any of this sound inconsistent to you? You are not alone, my friends.

First off we are all supposed to be impressed by the fact that the President just made another secret trip to Iraq, this time to Anbar Province, a focus of the recent "Surge" of Yank forces. Now its been four years since the American Forces went into liberate Baghdad and if things we're actually improving by now, as the neo-Conservatives assured us they would back in 2003-4, wouldn't it be possible to have a scheduled visit by Bush or a major cabinet officer to at least some location in Iraq?

Indeed whenever you hear about a Congressman or a tv hotshot like Katie Couric going outside the Green Zone in Baghdad or Fallujah, he or she is invariably being guarded from all sides by a platoon or two of Marines, and maybe some Apache helicoptors hovering overhead. Plus all the high-priced private outfits that hire ex-Special Forces types to guard the other American VIP's. Such progress!!

One would imagine it would have been easier to stroll casually through the rough end of Tombstone, Arizona back on that morning 125 years ago at the OK Corral (when the Clanton Gang and the Earps were firing lead at one another) than to even look like a Westerner on the streets of most Iraqi cities. A couple million Iraqis have fled the country and Syria--the only country that has let them in legally is going to seal the border in four months. This is "Mission Accomplished"?

One New York Republican Congressman on CNN's Wolf Blitzer news show last week mentioned three times how safe it was to travel around some market in Falujah. Mr. Blitzer finally got him to admit he was surrounded by Marines when he took his little "stroll" around the marketplace.

The fact is that there is a Civil War going on in Baghdad and the Sunni population is losing ground to the larger, Iranian-backed Shittes. Anbar is a Sunni Area and thousands of Sunni tribal warlords are currently more amenable to driving out pockets of Al-Queda fighters, the better to get more guns from the Americans so when they finish killing some qouta of foreign fighters, they can get back to the business of shooting it out with their sectarian countrymen.

Secondly, while things are reportedly going better in Anbar, the military brass went up on Capitol Hill yesterday and said yet again that there is still not near enough functioning Iraqi Army units that can operate on their own. I predict they never will be ready as long as there are Americans there to fight for them. Ditto the Iraq-based politicans will never strike bargains over serious "benchmarks" like oil revenue and power sharing as long as we are there to spill blood for their internecine arguments.

The President has said he will not be swayed by polls or public opinion. But even in a modern high-tech national security republic headed by elite and cocooned leaders, there comes a time when the will of the majority still will be heard:

Fifteen more months and there's another general election.

If Bush and the Congress, both highly unpopular and both claiming mandates from past elections, can't figure out that the majority of Americans are sick of this war and want to start the business of serious disengagment in Iraq, maybe the voters can show them a clearer sign.

To take a page from another Western, "High Noon", our military, like Gary Cooper's beleagurerd sheriff, has done enough law and order work for an ungrateful and nonsupportive citizenry. The time to drop the badge and let those townsfolk themselves do some cleaning up is sooner rather than far down the road.