These People Are Insane

Associated Press:

The Pentagon told Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton that her questions about how the U.S. plans to eventually withdraw from Iraq boosts enemy propaganda.

In a stinging rebuke to a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Undersecretary of Defense Eric Edelman responded to questions Clinton raised in May in which she urged the Pentagon to start planning now for the withdrawal of American forces.

Here's a clue: they don't need propaganda.

"Premature and public discussion of the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq reinforces enemy propaganda that the United States will abandon its allies in Iraq, much as we are perceived to have done in Vietnam, Lebanon and Somalia," Edelman wrote.

Of course, we had no business being in any of those three countries, either.

He added that "such talk understandably unnerves the very same Iraqi allies we are asking to assume enormous personal risks."

Those allies who are taking a month's vacation, while our troops fight and die? Those allies who can't meet the benchmarks set to demonstrate they're making progress? Those allies who have such confidence in us, anyway, because of the fine job we're doing destroying their country?

Clinton spokesman Philippe Reines called Edelman's answer "at once outrageous and dangerous," and said the senator would respond to his boss, Defense Secretary Robert Gates.