"Having traveled to Iraq numerous times in the past three years, what strikes me is how different the opinions of Iraqi people on the street are from the opinions of Iraqis in the government.
On the streets, Iraqis rail against the United States for creating the instability and chaos that plague the country, subjecting them to daily humiliations at checkpoints and in house raids and using their oil money to line the pockets of U.S. companies like Halliburton instead of rebuilding Iraq. They often refer to the U.S. occupation of their country as ``the new Saddam.'' The Senate recently voted unanimously to allocate $82 billion for the war, and even former anti-war Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean told an ACLU dinner in Minnesota on April 20 that, ''Now that we're there (in Iraq), we're there and we can't get out.'' Surprisingly, while policy-makers are afraid to have a real discussion about leaving Iraq, a majority of Americans have come to the conclusion that it's time for the troops to come home. A Washington Post-ABC News poll conducted April 21-24 found that 58 percent of Americans say that the United States has gotten bogged down in Iraq, 60 percent don't think that Iraq will have a stable, democratic government a year from now and 54 percent say the war with Iraq was not worth fighting.
The majority of Americans and Iraqis want to end the occupation. We now have to make our elected leaders -- both in the United States and in Iraq -- reflect our will. Our mission will truly be accomplished when our troops come home and Iraqis are given the chance to rebuild their beleaguered nation."-from the commentary today in the Miami Herald by Medea Benjamin, founding director of the human-rights group Global Exchange.
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