Ricardo Sanchez, who led U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq in the year immediately after the invasion says that it’s time for the United States to leave:
Retired Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, who led coalition forces through the first critical year of Iraq’s insurgency, said Saturday in a nationally broadcast radio address that President Bush had failed to “devise a strategy for victory” and that the time had come to withdraw U.S. troops.
In the Democratic rebuttal to Bush’s weekly radio address, Sanchez offered conditional support to a House war funding bill that requires combat troops to be out of Iraq by the end of 2008.
Bush has threatened to veto the bill, passed more than a week ago.
Sanchez, in an interview with the San Antonio Express-News on Saturday, cautioned that it’s unrealistic to expect all GIs to be out of the country in a year, and noted that Americans could be there a decade or more. But, he added, “We’ve got to transition responsibility to the Iraqis as rapidly as possible and allow for a corresponding drawdown in our forces.”
Sanchez, of course, is as responsible as anyone else for what happened in Iraq after the invasion, but his words are nonetheless yet another nail in the coffin of whatever credibility the Administration’s Iraq policy has left.
