Strib letters

From the StarTribune Wednesday letters,
in response to a commentary by MoveOn (or maybe still an honest Democrat) Senatorial candidate Mike Ciresi

Not much of a plan
Mike Ciresi makes a plea to move past the MoveOn ad to the substance of the Iraq war debate. He offers a four point plan:
• Support a diplomacy surge that involves a regional peace conference. (If we can convince Iran and Syria to take time out from killing U.S. soldiers to talk diplomacy, I'm all for that.)
• Withdraw our troops from the "civil war" in Iraq. (Great! We need to redeploy them to the civil war in Darfur and Burma.)
• Use troops withdrawn from Iraq to "combat terrorism, train Iraqis and protect Iraqi borders." (Just what the 2,600 Minnesotans who've returned from Iraq were doing.)
• Withdraw U.S. troops in harmony with the Iraqi government's progress on political benchmarks. (That's the policy now: "as the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down.")
I applaud Ciresi's condemnation of the MoveOn ad, and recognize that he was one of the first to do so. But his "plan" for Iraq is a mix of reality and fantasy.
DAVE THUL, OWATONNA, MINN.