Former New York Mayor Ed Koch, who campaigned for George Bush for President and is a noted foe of former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, has dropped his support of the Iraq war and now wants the troops to come home.
In a column in The Politico Koch says the time has come to realize the Iraq government is not up to the task and that Iraq is too divided for the U.S. to continue its presence there. And he also issues a wake-up call for the U.S. — and the American public, to get its focus back on terrorists who want to destroy the U.S.
I’m bailing out. I will no longer defend the policy of keeping U.S. troops in Iraq to assist the Iraqi central government in the ongoing civil war. While our men and women in the military suffer casualties daily, the Iraqi government refuses to take the major political steps required to end the civil war.
The U.S. government told the Iraqi government that it needed to achieve 18 goals. Our administration’s recent report to the U.S. Congress on how close the Iraqis have come to achieving those goals states that eight have been achieved, no progress has been made on eight others and two have had mixed results.
With regard to the most important goals, which include bringing the Sunni population into the Shia-dominated government by removing the bans against those (primarily Sunnis) who had served in the prior Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein, the grade was zero.
He then goes into more detail. And he ends his piece this way:
We then should prepare for a battle on American soil with the Islamic forces of terror. That battle could last at least 30 years. The terrorists must be defeated for if, God forbid, they defeat us they will put us to the sword. They refer to Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists and other Muslims they disagree with religiously as infidels.
Remember the words of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed after he killed Danny Pearl on Feb. 1, 2002: “I decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew, Daniel Pearl, in the City of Karachi, Pakistan.†He is the same Khalid Sheikh Mohammed whom CNN referred to as “the suspected mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.†He is now in American custody.
Remember, they have threatened to kill Pope Benedict XVI.
Remember also how we refused to take seriously the threats Adolf Hitler made in his book “Mein Kampf.†There were only 80 million Germans at the start of World War II. There are now 1.4 billion Muslims. While only a minority of Muslims subscribe to the Wahabist fundamentalist belief popular in Saudi Arabia that infidels must be killed, that minority of jihadists and their supporters still number in the tens of millions and is growing. Wake up, America.
Read it in its entirety.
The fact that Koch is now jumping ship should raise more than a few eyebrows. Ed Koch has always been a highly-independent politician who couldn’t be easily fit into one party’s category and one of the most refreshingly blunt-spoken political figures around — even if you don’t totally agree with him. I covered a Koch speech to a synagogue when I was a staff reporter on what was then Knight-Ridder’s Wichita Eagle Beacon (from 1980-1982). People loved him. I talked with him afterwards. He was delightfully candid and when he talked you believed he deeply felt what he said and was honestly giving you his best take on an issue. No spin.
Koch has been considered a staunch loyalist when it came to backing the Bush administration on the war on terror and the Iraq war. It shows more than ever that the U.S. is increasingly finding itself with an administration that is not just “isolated” on Iraq policy but essentially doing what it wants because it holds onto the levers of power and can do it because it has power.
But what is vanishing more and more each day is a government that operates with the support of its public, the bulk of elected officials in Congress, a growing number of people within its own party, and with many political elites who once supported it. Koch’s loss may not be huge in terms of convincing others — but it is highly symbolic.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.