Feingold Says Iraq Study Group Falls Short

While the report by the Iraq Study Group has many good suggestions for extricating America from George W. Bush's Iraq quagmire, it falls short of giving any firm definition for how soon that should take place. And, when I watched Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI) on Countdown with Keith Olbermann last night, I was once again saddened that Feingold has announced he is not running for president in 2008.

The Wisconsin Democrat, as usual, lays it on the line including the following:

"This commission was composed apparently entirely of people who did not have the judgment to oppose this Iraq war in the first place, and who did not have the judgment to realize it was not a wise move in the fight against terrorism.

"So that‘s who‘s doing this report. And then I looked at the list of who testified before them. There‘s virtually no one who opposed the war in the first place, virtually no one who‘s been really calling for a different strategy that goes for a global approach to the war on terrorism.

"So this is really a Washington inside job, and it shows not in the description of what‘s happened, that‘s fairly accurate, but it shows in the recommendations. It‘s been called a classic Washington compromise that does not do the job of extricating us from Iraq in a way that we can deal with the issues in Southeast Asia, in Afghanistan, and in Somalia, which are every bit as important as what is happening in Iraq.

"One of the things I really noticed is they said we should put our very best people embedded in the Iraqi army. Well, that‘s nice, but that means they won‘t be in Afghanistan. And we are losing ground to the Taliban in Afghanistan, which, as I remember, is where the attacks came from on 9/11."

Feingold also reiterates what he's been saying in the Senate for two years -- that the U.S. needs to actually start fighting a global war on terror, instead of simply claiming, as Team Bush does, that we're doing that in Iraq.

"So this thing fundamentally continues the ultimate mistake in Washington of looking at the world through the prism of Iraq, instead of looking at the threat from al Qaeda as a global problem."

Finally, Feingold makes it clear that we need to stop this posturing and equivocating and act, because we're losing more and more of our people every day.

"We lost 10 more troops in Iraq just today, Keith. How many more days are we going to put up with in this country of people dying in a situation that this report indicates isn‘t working? When you make a mistake, you should stop making the mistake. And this report misses the point."

You can see the entire clip at Crooks and Liars.