Reed talked to reporters while in Iraq today and called for beginning troop withdrawals within 120 days. From The Boston Globe:
BAGHDAD –Sen. Jack Reed on Saturday called for U.S. troops to begin withdrawing from Iraq within 120 days, saying local politicians have failed to take political action needed to consolidate gains from ongoing military operations to stabilize the country.
U.S. troops deployed on outskirts of the Iraqi capital are meeting their tactical objective of stopping the transit of insurgents in and out of Baghdad, but there is little evidence that politicians are translating the military success into political progress, the Democratic senator said.
Reed, a senior Armed Services panel member who has been a leading critic of Bush’s handling of the war, was speaking to reporters after visiting American and Iraq troops on the ground and meeting with the top U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker and military officers from the two countries.
Reed is on his 10th visit to Iraq since 2003 to assess how President Bush’s troop buildup is working.
The offensive around Baghdad is restricted by time and the availability of fresh troops, Reed indicated, adding the reality “suggests that we could begin, and we should begin now to transition the missions, begin a phased reduction of our forces,” and focus on training Iraqi forces, counterterrorism operations and protect U.S. forces that may remain in the country for those missions.
Although the operation may have helped to reduce the level of violence in parts of Iraq, the insurgents “still maintain the ability to have these high profile attacks like what happened today in the north of Iraq,” Reed said, referring to a suicide truck attack that killed more than 100 people in a marketplace.
The insurgents “have simply decided not to fight us because we’re too powerful and they’re just biding their time,” the Rhode Island Democrat said.
Democrats who run Congress are expected to make a new push for withdrawing U.S. troops when lawmakers return from their July Fourth break.
Kmareka.com 
Hallelujah!
Among the most appropriate of folkisms is the old addage, “you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink.” In the quagmire of Iraq, America may have learned that not all peoples, for what ever set of reasons, are ready to drink from the trough of freedom, self-determination and the sacredness of life over the cult of death. I suspect that we have also learned the painful lesson that the historic cobbling together, by force and fiat, of nation states to “tidy” up the maps of imperialist states substitutes for the historic development of the notion of nationhood in a population.
These are significant lessons to be learned and taught and remembered, else we will continue to be ensnared in the same kinds of quagmires again and again.
Sadly, I have come to conclude that America as a nation, cannot again allow our own electoral process to be so damaged that we would again select a President of such limited grasp of history or its nuances or limited intellectual capacity as Mr. Bush. Gaffs, bumbling and ineptitude may be charming at a Texas barbeque, but the world stage is much too difficult and challenging environment with stakes that involve lives and deaths and is not just a friendly poker game on a Friday night. We trust the lives of our young soldiers to the leadership of this Nation and we should expect no less than that trust will not be abused by a leadership that sends Americans on a death march in a miserable and alien land.
America has done all it can for the people of Iraq. The results of all the dollars spent, and more importantly, the blood sacrifice of America’s young men and women are much less than predicted, hoped for or realized. After the stunning military victories over the Iraqi forces, tt would have been far wiser in hind sight to simply have declared victory as Mr. Bush did, and give every household in Iraq $100,000, and withdrawn, telling them to go make a nation. Hundreds of billions of dollars later, and the pain and suffering of thousands of Americans dead and tens of thousands of their family members caught in that depression of anguish, Mr. Bush cannot demonstrate real leadership and say we have done enough and can do no more.
It is time to leave Iraq. The results may not be as we hoped throughout that dismal place. Indeed there will be a mess in Baghdad, but the North will remain organized and tranquil, and the South will manage in their own way. Iraq is the fault of misguided nations imposing statehood on a region that is tribal and non-functional as a nation state. It is also the fault of a tribal belief system that mingles Dark Age 7th century religion
with killing technologies of the 21st century and ignores the intellectualization of modernism. But there is little that we can do except support the Kurds, who have managed to function and will continue to fuction–they have the will and desire to succeed; support the Marsh Arabs and support the Southern Shiites. Letting Iraq fragment into relatively stable spheres of action, will allow our withdrawal and no more of our young people need to be sacrificed. We have led the Iraqi “horses” to water. Some have sipped and some not. We have done what we can in Iraq. Now it is up to us all to be certain that when we choose our next leaders, we do that more wisely.
Thank you Mr. Wolberg. We are all hoping for progress and a chance at better leadership in the next election.
Don, I agree. Democracy is not something that is imposed, but something that grows over time. Not over decades, but centuries. Look at the democracies in the world – they’re still unfinished works in progress.
I think more importantly than electing a future president with a great grasp of history is electing one who is not so blinded by his own ideology that he excludes all evidence, history, etc. contrary to that ideology. To be fair, it’s not just the president, but seemingly all the president’s men.
They’d have done well to read The Future of Freedom, Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad by Fareed Zakaria before they went on this wild goose chase in Iraq. In this concise work, Zakaria points out the difficulty of reconciling “democracy” and “liberty” here at home and how difficult it is to export these concepts – especially societies with no history with either democracy or personal liberty.
Very significant points Geofff, but I think there is more to the war issue than just the advice Mr. Bush received from his senior staff. For example, he ignored Mr. Powell, who urged that Mr. Bush not go to war. I would suggest that Mr. Bush was determined from the beginning of his administration to take down the Iraqi government. In the fact that he listened only his “team” members who agreed with his views are but the icing on his war cake; Mr. Bush wanted an Iraq war and went about steering that course as soon as he took office. The question then becomes “why?” I will not speculate here about the possibilites, but just suggest they were less than substantive, and I will also note that Sadam Hussein could easily have stopped the war process by either allowing the inspectors back, or leaving the country. He did neither and thus provided the immediate cause of the war.
However, remaining in Iraq beyond any reasonable expectation of an Iraqi government on paper becoming a government in fact, or waiting for the Iraqi populace to realize their destiny is indeed in their hands, reflects on the inability of Mr. Bush to adapt to current realities, just as much as it shows a lack of democratic tradition amongst the Iraqi populace. For a time, I recall Mr. Bush would frequently mention a book by the Israeli Natan Sharansky, the main premise of which was that democracies rarely if ever make war on other democracies. The logical extension of this concept in Mr. Bush’s mind was that all we had to do was to bring “democracy” to the nation’s of the world and all would be well. This tortured logic is so very close to the 19th century “White man’s burden” excuse for European imperialism that it is frightening. The “democratic notion” as Geoff notes, is not the product of some instant “magic dust” to be sprinkled over a body politic, it is the result of a lengthy evolutionary process of governance by consensus, respect for dissent and respect for individual liberty.