Perhaps the most glaring deficiency of the ISG report is that it is at it’s esssence a breaking of a promise to the Iraqi people.

Back in 2004, Michael Rubin wrote in National Review:

“While Iraqis remain grateful for their liberation, there is great suspicion of U.S. intentions, not because al-Jazeera commentators suggest we came for oil, but rather because they doubt Washington’s commitment to democracy. Speaking before the National Endowment for Democracy on November 6, Bush declared that U.S. commitment to democracy in the Middle East would be “a focus of American policy for decades to come.” But, in recent days, Iraqi democrats and liberals complain that State Department and National Security Council officials charged with implementing Bush’s vision work not to enforce it, but rather to undermine it.

Iraqis are obsessed with American betrayal. When explaining why they are hesitant to trust American political leaders, Iraqi Kurds cite 1975, the year Secretary of State Henry Kissinger brokered the Algiers Accords between Tehran and Baghdad. As part of the agreement which addressed border disputes between the two countries left unresolved since the 1847 Treaty of Erzurum, Washington and Tehran agreed to withdrawal their support from Iraqi Kurdish rebels. The Kurdish uprising, led by Masud Barzani’s father Mullah Mustafa, collapsed in a blood bath, sending tens of thousands of refugees into Iranian Kurdistan.

Iraqi Arabs and Kurds both point to March 1991 as evidence that American rhetoric is insincere. On February 15, 1991, speaking to a crowd of workers on the floor of a U.S. munitions factory, President George H. W. Bush declared, “…The Iraqi military and the Iraqi people [should] take matters into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein the dictator to step aside.” Iraqis rose to the president’s challenge, quickly seizing 14 of Iraq’s 18 governorates. The president, counseled by his national-security adviser and then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell, stood by as Saddam’s Baathist regime and its senior military officers massacred tens of thousands of civilians. “It wasn’t so much that you didn’t help,” one Kurdish political leader told me in 2000, “but rather that you helped Saddam. Why else would you release the Republican Guard prisoners just in time for them to rearm and regroup.” Heading into an election year, White House strategists decided to let politics trump principle.

And so, from an Iraqi perspective, history repeats itself. Iraqis today say they face another betrayal.”

Yesterday, that suspicion was confirmed – at least in the minds of the Iraqi leadership.

“Bassim Ridha, a top advisor to Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, said the White House has to support Baghdad “all the way”.

“If they do not support the government then it will look as if they do not do what they preach,” Ridha said. “We need their support to go forward.”

Thankfully, though, in spite of the hammering of the MSM and the left that the President “must” follow the panel’s recommendations, the fact is that President Bush remembers and keeps his word and has no intention to moving to withdrawal our troops from the fight based on the hysterics of the ISG conclusions. Presidential Press Secretary Tony Snow said as much during interviews yesterday as he said the President would wait until other studies come in before weighing the options.

UPDATE I: Surrender Monkeys.