A Speech you will never hear.

And it’s a damned shame.

No, this isn’t snarky – there’s not a “fuck” in the carload. And I couldn’t expect a “mea culpa” from a lying viper. But something like this could be delivered with minor modification even by an amoral weasel interested solely in saving his own ass…and still be be sold as the Pure Quill.

And still get our children the hell out of Iraq.
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My Fellow Americans:

Tonight I have come to speak to you – as one American to another – about a subject that I know is uppermost in all of our minds.

Iraq.

There is good news to report, but there is also news that will be hard for some us to hear. However I know we, as Americans, can always be relied on to face the facts – good and bad – with a clear eye and a strong heart. And as your President, I own you nothing less than the straight truth.

The good news is that the Dictator Hussein is gone forever and along with him, one of the worst regimes on Earth has been consigned to oblivion. The rapes rooms are closed and will never be reopened. And the people of Iraq have, with the help of our young men and women in uniform, taken the first steps down a road towards a better, freer future.

The hard news is that the reasons we went into Iraq – the reasons we gave to the world why it was absolutely necessary to invade and occupy Iraq – turned out to be wrong. As is now obvious, there were no WMDs in Iraq. No terrorist camps and no nuclear weapons facilities. And the cost in American blood and treasure has been higher – far higher – than we expected.

All I can say is, on balance, I still believe in my heart that we have done a great service to the people of Iraq and ofthe world. That we went to war with the best of intentions and once we found that the reasons we went in were not true, we have worked day and night to redeem our decision to go by working to make Iraq a freer and safer society than it ever would have been under the Hussein regime.

Today I still believe that a free and democratic Iraq is a noble goal and well worth pursuing, but I believe it is increasingly clear that the heavy American presence in Iraq is becoming counterproductive to that very goal. By staying in Iraq long after is has been shown that the reasons we went in were mistaken, we are in danger of undermining our Nation’s good name.

Even though our intentions were in the best tradition of American Values, the unintended consequences of our presence in Iraq has strained our relationships with friends and allies, allowed our enemies to portray us as imperialists and helped terrorists recruit the poor and desperate to their evil cause.

We cannot allow ourselves to become the reason the insurgency continues to grow. We cannot allow ourselves to unwittingly abet terrorists. This is a simple matter to correct, and the stakes are simply too high to do otherwise.

If we had a million men and women and a trillion dollars and ten years, I have no doubt we could win this war militarily. Our brave men and women in uniform have always stood tall and done whatever the nation has asked of them, but the work to be done in Iraq is no longer the work of soldiers. It is the work of diplomats and engineers. Of cop and schoolteachers. Of clerics and colleges students.

And even if we had every resource in the world, I would still come before you tonight and announce that the time has come to begin to remove our forces from Iraq for the simple reason that being an Occupier – however reluctantly and however noble our intentions – is not healthy for the Soul of America. We are not a nation of conquerors or invaders; we go to war reluctantly and we leave war behind gladly because above all things we value liberty and peace.

Before you elected me as your President, I told you that, “I think the United States must be humble. We must be proud and confident of our values, but humble in how we treat nations that are figuring out how to chart their own course." And I come before you tonight to tell you that I still stand by those words, and that I believe we have reached the limits to what we can accomplish militarily in Iraq, so with the deepest gratitude for their sacrifices in the cause of Freedom, I am announcing, first, that the leaders of both political parties and I will sit down together tomorrow with the Joint Chiefs of Staff and begin to plan for the phased draw-down of troops from Iraq.

Second, I believe it is time to put our differences over the war in the past, so I now call upon the United Nations – specifically the permanent members of the UN Security Council and the delegates from Muslim and Arab nations -- to help us help the Iraqi people during this period of transition. While the presence of the United States was indispensable to the ouster the Dictator Hussein and his evil regime, the United State would be foolish to now allow ourselves to become an impediment to the very goal towards which we have been working.

We need your help and, more importantly, the Iraqi people need your help.

Finally, I believe it is time for us to put our domestic differences behind us as well. War is – and always should be – a subject of passionate debate and discussion in a Democracy, but we must not allow our passion for the good of our nation to become a partisan attack on those that disagree with us. I believe too often, some of those that have supported this war have allowed irresponsible individuals to suggest that to oppose or question the war in any way makes a person a bad or disloyal American.

As your President I will tell you that nothing could be further from the truth.

Our best weapon against tyranny has always been the simplest: to just practice what we preach.

To show those that want to extinguish liberty in the world that we Americans not only tolerate, but celebrate, a raucous, family debate over the course our nation should be taking. We fuss and fight, but in the end we are all Americans. And even though I may disagree with them strongly, I still believe with all my heart that the young man or woman passionately protesting our presence in Iraq loves this country every bit as much as I do. And calling them disloyal or traitorous for standing up for what they believe in is not only plain wrong, it helps our enemies and lets them to depict us an hypocrites.

We are a great nation with a great destiny and I believe we have done the world a service by removing an evil regime from power. And although our work in Iraq is far from over, as the next chapter for the Iraqi people opens, the work of our military in that country must now draw to a close.

Thank you, good night, and may God bless the United States of America.


(And then we get the Hell out.)