Comments Posted By Porphyrogenitus
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TIME IS NOW THE BIGGEST ENEMY IN IRAQ
You wrote:
"It may involve giving in to the Democrats and withdrawing some of our troops and redeploying some others."
The problem with this plan isn't that it involves the President "giving in to the Democrats" or giving up his Clintonian Legacy(tm), it's that it's strategically self-defeating and would put us right back where we were last fall, when my unit left Iraq and everyone was saying the error was we hadn't had enough troops there and weren't maintaining a presence in areas to prevent terrorists and insurgents from moving right back in after we cleared them out.
That criticism had merit - and I assume it was what you meant by mistakes and errors that put us where we were then.
The President *was*, IMNSHO, "big enough" to admit they were on the wrong course, changed the team, followed the (then) advice of critics of how the war was being conducted, and sent more troops to rectify those problems.
Not meaning to be one of those critics of everything you post, but it seems to me that whipsawing back to that would give the Iraqis an even greater sense of our unreliability, and removing troops in the middle of what is supposed to be a "surge" to secure Baghdad and Anbar would only give everyone the sense that we aren't going to be there.
To put it mildly, things have certainly not gone swimmingly. That much of what you say is spot-on. But leaving us thinner on the ground, and withdrawing back to base camps with sweeps against al-Qaeda and pockets of resistance, and giving notice that we intend to leave as soon as practically feasible - well, been there, done that, *that* was the much-criticized Rumsfeld Strategy.
Now, again IMNSHO, the best thing to do would be to at least give the "surge" a year to play itself out. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work - but it *is* the alternative policy on the table with a *chance* of success. In inacting it, the President *did* aknowledge that the strategy his team had been following before wasn't working. What *didn't* happen (*ahem*) was critics meeting, even grudgingly, halfway across the asile in the spirit of American interest ("bipartisan compromise" be damned - I don't care if the parties get along if it doesn't help the country. I care about the country). The timeline here at home has been almost completely dictated by the political calendar - hardly an inspiring period of selfless public service and displays of "profiles in courage".
(Minor aside: as for the Kurds and their reticence on the oil $ distro scheme, well I think they *do* have reason for concern that if it gets centralized, ultimately that will mean the money won't get to Kurdistan. But that very point, rather than contradicting your larger point about the difficulty of generating trust and compromise in Iraq, only highlights it even more. However, if I had to pick between which were more uncompromisingly sectarian, politicians in Iraq or in the American Congress, I'd be hard-pressed to chose between them).
Comment Posted By Porphyrogenitus On 29.04.2007 @ 21:49
