As Baghdad Watches a Burning Bush

The military gets a selection of channels on AFN cable tv here in Iraq. Simpsons, with Fox and CNN, stuff like that. So I was walking by a tv in waiting area of a military camp in the Baghdad area. I'd just flown into Baghdad and was waiting to drive to the Green Zone.
The Resident of the White House, George Bush, came on tv to talk about the strings that were attached to the war funding bills, specifically the withdrawal plans being attached to the budget.
The room was empty at the time when the speech ran live, except for a NCO at the LNO desk. This soldier was not impressed and made disgusted sighs every time Bush said it was the democrats that were making this war suck.
Later, the news replays all night long showed the footage over as the room filled up with soldiers. No one said they wanted to go home. One Marine Corps Colonel was rather upset with Senator Harry Reid. To be honest, while almost every soldier I have talked to says they want to come home, many of them want to stay and finish this job.
I suspect that their will be a spring offensive soon. Many soldiers and others have said that now the insurgents see that they are winning they will work hard to cause trouble and get our politicians to pull out of Iraq. I know they watch what is going on—when I was in Afghanistan last spring, when the US phased out much of it's combat operations and handed it off to ISAF and the Canadian/British troops. The fighting got bad, as bad if not worse than the initial invasion in 2001.

Bush says that if he doesn't get what he wants, the troops will suffer because of the democrats. Well, that does not seem to be true.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9213654

Most of the shit going down is because of his administrations fuck ups, not the fuck ups of the democrats.

Personally, I like a few ideas related to the withdrawal—1). Have the Iraqi's vote. Do they want us here? 2) make the deployment to Iraq voluntary. Instead of ordering people in or out of this war, let's exercise a little democracy. Iraq is not our enemy, really, and this isn't some crazy shit like WWII where we need all hands on deck. Shia and Sunni have been killing each other for 1385 years. We are not going to make a difference in five or ten years when this blood feud is way older than even our country.