...first of all, we do not 'allow' or 'not allow' the Iraqi people to do anything. U.S. and other coalition forces are present in Iraq under a UN mandate passed unanimously by the UN Security Council. Nevertheless, it is the job of the Iraqi government, once it is set up, to decide not only what its policies should be, including the presence of coalition forces, but also what questions to bring directly to the Iraqi people. If the Iraqi people's elected leaders decide to have the population vote on this or any other question, they are fully free to do so. And as the President has indicated, if a democratically elected government or the Iraqi people were to ask us to leave, we would do so.

Half of Iraqis Approve of Attacks on US Forces, Including 9 Out of 10 Sunnis Full Report (.pdf) Questionnaire/Methodology (.pdf) Asked whether "the US government plans to have permanent military bases in Iraq or to remove all its military forces once Iraq is stabilized," 80% overall assume that the US plans to remain permanently, including 79% of Shia, 92% of Sunnis and 67% of Kurds. Only small minorities believe that the US plans "to remove all its military forces once Iraq is stabilized" (overall 18%, Shia 21%, Sunni 7%, Kurds 28%). Iraqis of all ethnic groups also agree that the US is unlikely to take direction from the Iraqi government. Asked what they think the US would do if the new government were to ask the US to withdraw its forces within six months, 76% overall assume that the US would refuse to do so (Shia 67%, Sunni 94%, Kurds 77%). Support for Timetable: Asked what they would like the newly elected Iraqi government to ask the US-led forces to do, 70% of Iraqis favor setting a timeline for the withdrawal of US forces.

...would you, as President sworn to protect, decided...

Only when they became a problem to us did we life and eyebrow and express concern for freedom or democracy or any of that

I didn't leave the conservative blogs. By being so consistently wrong about, you know, everything, they left me.

(CBS) When no weapons of mass destruction surfaced in Iraq, President Bush insisted that all those WMD claims before the war were the result of faulty intelligence. But a former top CIA official, Tyler Drumheller -- a 26-year veteran of the agency -- has decided to do something CIA officials at his level almost never do: Speak out. He tells correspondent Ed Bradley the real failure was not in the intelligence community but in the White House. He says he saw how the Bush administration, time and again, welcomed intelligence that fit the president's determination to go to war and turned a blind eye to intelligence that did not. "It just sticks in my craw every time I hear them say it's an intelligence failure. It's an intelligence failure. This was a policy failure," Drumheller tells Bradley. Drumheller was the CIA's top man in Europe, the head of covert operations there, until he retired a year ago. He says he saw firsthand how the White House promoted intelligence it liked and ignored intelligence it didn't: "The idea of going after Iraq was U.S. policy. It was going to happen one way or the other," says Drumheller.

Dadler - I've never seen any proof that we gave him permission. Confusion and bad performance by the DOS perhaps, but not permission.

The biggest problem says Karl Rove, the President's political guru, is that "People like this president. They're just sour right now on the war." Rove may be significantly low-balling the damage the past 18 months have done to Bush's personal ratings, but the GOP is mobilizing on the basis of Rove's analysis. Those of us who remember the Vietnam War understand that peace breaks out just before every election. And we are seeing the signs right now.

Currently over 60% of the world's oil reserves are in Middle East. Four countries in the region, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq and Kuwait have over half of the world's proven oil reserves. ...the fact is that in 15 years the North American and Asia Pacific oil reserves will be depleted. This will represent a marked reduction in oil supplies worldwide. In other words, within 15 years, if we do not increase oil production drastically in the Middle East and elsewhere, the world will face tremendous oil shortages.

The honey theory of Iraqi reconstruction stems from the most cherished belief of the war's ideological architects: that greed is good. Not good just for them and their friends but good for humanity, and certainly good for Iraqis. Greed creates profit, which creates growth, which creates jobs and products and services and everything else anyone could possibly need or want. The role of good government, then, is to create the optimal conditions for corporations to pursue their bottomless greed, so that they in turn can meet the needs of the society. The problem is that governments, even neoconservative governments, rarely get the chance to prove their sacred theory right: despite their enormous ideological advances, even George Bush's Republicans are, in their own minds, perennially sabotaged by meddling Democrats, intractable unions, and alarmist environmentalists. Iraq was going to change all that. In one place on Earth, the theory would finally be put into practice in its most perfect and uncompromised form. A country of 25 million would not be rebuilt as it was before the war; it would be erased, disappeared. In its place would spring forth a gleaming showroom for laissez-faire economics, a utopia such as the world had never seen. Every policy that liberates multinational corporations to pursue their quest for profit would be put into place: a shrunken state, a flexible workforce, open borders, minimal taxes, no tariffs, no ownership restrictions. The people of Iraq would, of course, have to endure some short-term pain: assets, previously owned by the state, would have to be given up to create new opportunities for growth and investment. Jobs would have to be lost and, as foreign products flooded across the border, local businesses and family farms would, unfortunately, be unable to compete. But to the authors of this plan, these would be small prices to pay for the economic boom that would surely explode once the proper conditions were in place, a boom so powerful the country would practically rebuild itself. The fact that the boom never came and Iraq continues to tremble under explosions of a very different sort should never be blamed on the absence of a plan. Rather, the blame rests with the plan itself, and the extraordinarily violent ideology upon which it is based.

Read this, Jim.

FYI if you want to learn about the links between AQ and Saddam read the weekly standard.

The US DoE report shows that at today's prices Venezuela's oil reserves are bigger than those of the entire Middle East including Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, Iran and Iraq. The US DoE also identifies Canada as another future oil superpower. Venezuela's deposits alone could extend the oil age for another 100 years. The US DoE estimates that Chavez controls 1.3 trillion barrels of oil - more than the entire declared oil reserves of the rest of the planet. Hugo Chavez told Newsnight's Greg Palast that "Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world. In the future Venezuela won't have any more oil - but that's in the 22nd century. Venezuela has oil for 200 years." Chavez will ask the OPEC meeting in June to formally accept that Venezuela's reserves are now bigger than Saudi Arabia's.

The great historical irony of the catastrophe unfolding in Iraq is that the shock-therapy reforms that were supposed to create an economic boom that would rebuild the country have instead fueled a resistance that ultimately made reconstruction impossible. Bremer's reforms unleashed forces that the neocons neither predicted nor could hope to control, from armed insurrections inside factories to tens of thousands of unemployed young men arming themselves. These forces have transformed Year Zero in Iraq into the mirror opposite of what the neocons envisioned: not a corporate utopia but a ghoulish dystopia, where going to a simple business meeting can get you lynched, burned alive, or beheaded. These dangers are so great that in Iraq global capitalism has retreated, at least for now. For the neocons, this must be a shocking development: their ideological belief in greed turns out to be stronger than greed itself.

Whatever it takes, let's get out of there. ...this colossal mistake of a preemptive war entered on false assumptions at best and at worst, outright lies? The best way to support our troops is to bring them home.

One former officer described how in April of 2002, nearly a year before the invasion, the CIA sent a special unit of eight men to "set up shop" in the Kurdish areas of northern Iraq. The team had no support from the Pentagon and was told that if it got into trouble, team members would have to get out on their own. At the start the team had fixed communications "windows" when it made contact with Washington, but otherwise operated with little input from CIA headquarters. "[They] had an enormous amount of autonomy," this officer said. One of the team's chief goals was to develop a network of intelligence sources that could support the invasion and, afterwards, the occupation and reconstruction of Iraq. The team started its efforts with the Kurds. "The key thing was credibility," said this person. "We had to get them . . . fully committed by convincing them that this time we were serious, [that] we would finish it and get rid of Saddam."

Ernesto - And what does OBL have to do with my question?

The top U.S. commander in Iraq has drafted a plan that projects steep reductions in the U.S. military presence there by the end of 2007, The New York Times reported on Saturday. ... According to the newspaper, the plan envisions the first reductions coming in September, ahead of November's U.S. midterm elections, with two of the 14 combat brigades there being rotated out of Iraq without being replaced.

Clinton pretty well ignored the problem for quite a while, and then decided that he should bomb Iraq during his impeachment trial. Some made claims that he was just trying to defocus us, but I choose to give him a pass.

Better yet, how many people were killed when he played wag the dog and attacked an asprin factory? And on the day of his impeachment no less.

Oh he did bomb Iraq a few times, blasted a couple of cruise missiles at OBL everytime he thought he was in trouble and about to be impeached.

In 1998, you said Saddam had "not nearly disarmed." Now you say he doesn't have weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Why did you change your mind? I have never given Iraq a clean bill of health! Never! Never! I've said that no one has backed up any allegations that Iraq has reconstituted WMD capability with anything that remotely resembles substantive fact. To say that Saddam's doing it is in total disregard to the fact that if he gets caught he's a dead man and he knows it. Deterrence has been adequate in the absence of inspectors but this is not a situation that can succeed in the long term. In the long term you have to get inspectors back in.

Question: Iraq's borders are porous. Why couldn't Saddam have obtained the capacity to produce WMD since 1998 when the weapons inspectors left? I am more aware than any UN official that Iraq has set up covert procurement funds to violate sanctions. This was true in 1997-1998, and I'm sure its true today.

and all he did was demonstrate that he was not forth coming.

We eliminated the nuclear program, and for Iraq to have reconstituted it would require undertaking activities that would have been eminently detectable by intelligence services. If Iraq were producing [chemical] weapons today, we'd have proof, pure and simple. [A]s of December 1998 we had no evidence Iraq had retained biological weapons, nor that they were working on any. In fact, we had a lot of evidence to suggest Iraq was in compliance

FYI if you want to learn about the links between AQ and Saddam read the weekly standard

This has come out of things like articles in The Weekly Standard and so on. It's basically laundry lists of raw reporting in which if you make certain inferences. There's some kind of connection. There was a phone call made, or there was a meeting held. Indeed, there were some meetings held back early in the 1990s between individuals associated with the Saddam regime [and] individuals associated with Al Qaeda. They were mainly in the nature of feeling each other out, certainly nothing that came close to an alliance or a sponsorship or cooperative relationship. But in the world of international terrorism, ... it's possible to link just about anyone to just about anyone else. If you dig hard enough for enough circumstantial reporting, meetings, phone calls, names that come up in the same breath, travel to the same place at about the same time, you and I could be seen to have a relationship, probably, if someone worked hard enough at linking us through such things like that. That's very different from forming an analytic judgment about what is the nature of the relationship we had. ... It becomes very easy to use raw reporting to try to make the case that there is a substantial relationship, losing sight of the fact that relationships can be ones of suspicion or even competition, as well as ones of cooperation. In the case of the one we're talking about, Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's Iraq, [it] was more the former: suspicion of feeling each other out.