May 9, 2007

Iraqi Parliament: U.S. Out of Iraq

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In a comment to a previous blog post about the Baghdad Wall, a reader wrote:

The Iraqis don’t want us out (at least not yet). If the Iraqis wanted us out now, they would communicate that to their representatives in the government, who would communicate it to us, and we would then leave. The fact is (as I saw during my time in Korea 30+ years ago), the Iraqis trust the Americans more than the trust fellow Iraqis. Thus, for now, they prefer we stay.

Even this reader must now concede that the Iraqis want us to get the hell out of Baghdad. Yesterday, a majority vote in the Iraqi parliament supported forcing the United States to set a timeline for withdrawal of troops.

So will we or will we not respect the budding Iraqi democracy? Reader poll in the comments section.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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