Dubai: President George W. Bush faced mounting calls yesterday to pull US troops immediately out of Iraq, where coalition troops are dying every day and where the military campaign has turned into a "lost cause" according to the New York Times.
In an editorial published yesterday, the influential daily said: "It is time for the United States to leave Iraq, without any more delay than the Pentagon needs to organise an orderly exit," the newspaper wrote in a rare, single-issue editorial taking up half of a news page.
"Like many Americans, we have put off that conclusion, waiting for a sign that President Bush was seriously trying to dig the United States out of the disaster he created by invading Iraq without sufficient cause, in the face of global opposition, and without a plan to stabilise the country afterward," the daily wrote.
But it has since emerged that Bush has "neither the vision nor the means" to do that. "It is frighteningly clear that Mr Bush's plan is to stay the course as long as he is president and dump the mess on his successor. Whatever his cause was, it is lost," the daily said.
The stinging criticism came a day after the second deadliest bombing in Iraq in nearly four years killed 150 people. The new wave of violence continued yesterday when a suicide attacker killed scores in a Sunni neighbourhood in the western Anbar province, in what many Iraqi politicians and analysts said was a part of a plan to divide the country.
Both attacks were blamed on Al Qaida. "I believe Al Qaida, whether intentionally or not, is working according to an agenda that is similar to the Iranian one, and the extreme right [in the US]. This agenda is about dividing Iraq," Saleh Al Mutlaq, head of the Sunni National Dialogue Front, told Gulf News.
'Plan to divide nation'
Al Qaida, he said, has proposed setting up an Islamic state, which will never be accepted by Shiites and Kurds. However Shiite columnist Halim Al Araji said in a statement to Gulf News that Al Qaida is "the evil that everything is blamed upon" and that plans for the division "were prepared long ago".
With additional reports from Jumana Al Tamimi, GCC & Middle East Editor
