I Hate to Sound Pessimistic But...

...doesn't President Obama sneaking into Baghdad under heavy security kind of remind anyone of the previous boob who had to do the same thing, even to the point of skulking back out under cover of night?

Especially when the most substantial thing he can say is, "Guys, you've gotta stand up on your own so we can stand down."

I mean, I applaud the new President for showing more energy and commitment to responsibly getting our troops out but when he starts sounding and acting like the last guy, I'm not exactly filled with a lot of hope that we'll finally get most of our people out within that much ballyhooed 16 month timeline.

So far, in this hurricane of activity in the first 77 days or so of the Obama administration, I haven't once heard the president address the other problems regarding Iraq, such as contractor abuses in the form of corruption and ineptitude. Outsourcing basic needs that used to be met by the military even down to feeding the troops to corporations and enticing them with cost-plus, no bid contracts that actually rewards them for their incompetence is perhaps the single biggest problem in Iraq that Obama hasn't addressed.

He never even bothered mentioning these very real problems during the campaign as did none of the other major candidates.

In other words, instead of worrying solely about nation building, we need to take steps to ensure that such greed (or have we forgotten about the 363 tons of cash that we'd airlifted into Iraq years ago?), laziness and incompetence never happens again next time we invade on false pretexts a nation whose leader had killed far fewer of his countrymen than the maniacs in Sudan and Burma.

Then we can, perhaps, turn our attention to nation building here at home after the wrecker balling by which we'd been victimized for the last eight years.