Pull Out Now (If Only Bush I Had)!

Goddess help me, I agree with everything Sally Quinn has to say today. (It's still, as it always is, ALL ABOUT SALLY, and it provides some interesting insight into a woman who married a man much older than she is, but, beyond that, she's spot on.)

After regaling us with several paragraphs about (natch) herself, Quinn explains what she saw as a child on an army plane full of soldiers wounded in the Korean War:

The thing I remember most vividly is the soldiers screaming in pain and crying out for their mothers. My mother went up and down the aisles holding their hands, stroking their brows, giving them sips of water. My sister helped light their cigarettes. Many of them were amputees. Some had no stomachs, some had no faces.

The soldiers in the litters above and below me both died, blood dripping from their wounds. Many other soldiers died while we were in the air. We had to stop in Hawaii overnight to refuel and to leave the bodies.

Turning to the boyking's plans to defy his own father and escalate the war in Iraq, Quinn says: I hope that when President Bush discusses sending more troops to Iraq, knowing that we will have to pull out sooner rather than later, that the conversation comes around to the human suffering. Does anyone at the table ask about the personal anguish, the long-term effects, emotional, psychological and financial, on the families of those killed, wounded or permanently disabled?

When I hear about the surge, all I can think of is those young soldiers on the plane to Texas. We have already lost more than 3,000 soldiers, and many more have been wounded and disabled.

Quinn then makes what I think is an incredibly important and almost-always-overlooked (or at least unstated) point about the situation in Iraq: We have three choices here. All three are immoral. We can keep the status quo and gradually pull out; we can surge [and then, Quinn doesn't add, but I will, pull out]; or we can pull out now. You know --and I realize that this concept is anathema to religious fundamentalists and producers of Hollywood westerns, but -- there are many situations in life where we can find ourselves without any completely moral choices. They usually happen after we've backed ourselves (and sometimes others) into a bad situation. Sometimes the only choice left to us is to try and figure out how to select the lesser of several bad options. I've been there; I'm sure that you have once or twice, as well.

We, as a society, are going to be facing a lot of these situations over the next couple of decades. We've backed ourselves into corners on this war, on the environment, on our economy, on our relations with the rest of the world, on health care, on education, on the role of religion in public life, on the role of corporations in our society. We need to face up to this fact and start figuring out now how to deal with these issues.

In the end, Quinn comes to the correct conclusion: When I think about those young soldiers on that plane coming back from Japan years ago, I believe pulling out now is the least immoral choice.