As the dust settles gently over the Tigris and Euphrates, Decider George’s war in Iraq has moved into its final stages — the US military should at least now have plans (or plans in the immediate works) for an ‘Eagle Pull.’
The last time was in Saigon, 1975, a disaster: Photos of helicopters lifting off from the roof of the US embassy captured Vietnam’s complete failure.
In Iraq, however, if an Eagle Pull isn’t planned out to the smallest detail could bring on a horrible, death-struck situation, one which would make Napoleon’s Russian retreat looked like a cakewalk.

Last week’s collision bewteen Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr could be the defining moment for the US as the fiasco became Moqtada’s Moment.
The jarring impact of Sadr’s Mehdi Army against the Iraqi government forces was immediate: Sadr came out of the blood-letting stronger and more potent — His main Shiite rivals, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim’s Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq and Maliki’s own Dawa party have been cowered, proven to be nothing more than lap dogs for the US occupiers and greatly weakened.
Decider George has really fouled the waters. Iraq suffers from a multi, many-split personality disorder and no amount of time or number of US GIs on the ground can change the future.

Sadr is an ardent nationalist and has repeadedly crowed for withdrawal of all US troops. He’s called for a nationwide strike April 8 and the rest of the story could be history — a horrifying history.

“The time has come to express your rejections and raise your voices loud against the unjust occupier and enemy of nations and humanity, and against the horrible massacres committed by the occupier against our honourable people,” said a statement released by Sadr’s office in the holy city of Najaf.
— Reuters, (4/3/08)

Into this meat grinder come the US kids, who must fight a fight coming at them from all sides. The Iraqi central government is a sham and according to published reports, the Sunni minority refer to Maliki’s operation as the “traitor government.”
So, the US could end up fighting not only Shia Sadr’s Mehdi militia, but the Sunni malcontents as well.

The only option for the US is to get the shit out of Dodge:

“At the same time, Prime Minister Maliki’s military actions in Basra and Baghdad, indicate even wider political and military fragmentation. We are witnessing is more accurately described as the road to the Balkanization of Iraq, that is, political fragmentation. We are being asked by the president to believe that this shift of so much power and finance to so many local chieftains is the road to political centralization. He describes the process as building the state from the bottom up.
I challenge you to press the administration’s witnesses this week to explain this absurdity. Ask them to name a single historical case where power has been aggregated successfully from local strong men to a central government except through bloody violence leading to a single winner, most often a dictator. That is the history of feudal Europe’s transformation to the age of absolute monarchy. It is the story of the American colonization of the west and our Civil War. It took England 800 years to subdue clan rule on what is now the English-Scottish border. And it is the source of violence in Bosnia and Kosovo.
The only sensible strategy is to withdraw rapidly but in good order. Only that step can break the paralysis now gripping US strategy in the region.”
— Lt. Gen. (Ret.) William E. Odom, Testimony US Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Iraq, (4/2/08)

Odom, who has been around the military block, has called Decider George’s Iraq war the greatest blunder, “strategic disaster” in US history. General Odom is being generous: In all of history.

And who will listen?
The historic reality is a mind-blowing slaughter as the US removes itself like a festered boil from Iraq.