Can't really call "The Surge" anything like a success, and I wish the media would stop referring to it as such.
The increase in troops had NOTHING to do with the successes, such as they are.
No, the change in tactics, which could have been accomplished without ANY further troops, is what lead to success. But of course, admitting to that means also admitting the prior tactics were utterly flawed, so you need political cover for the change - so much for openness and honesty I guess.
The reality is, however, that "The Surge" coincided with the end of the balkanization process in Baghdad and elsewhere - and that as a result, no progress on 'living together' or any movement in the political process, has occured. Before the idiots on the right start claiming success, I ask them to remember what they SAID the surge was supposed to accomplish, specifically it was supposed to:
Allow for the Iraqi government to make progress on mandatory and critical political and social framework agreements necessary to establish a lasting and stable government.
Has that happened? The clear answer is 'No!' - and so either the surge was the wrong solution, or it had the wrong outcome assigned to it, or it couldn't accomplish it in the first place - all of which are really true - and in the end then, indicate a Bush Administration so far out of touch with how to bring peace to Iraq that it is incompetent to be allowed to continue, either as Bush, or as Bush-lite under McCain. In reality I suspect the Bushies (McCain included) probably KNEW that political progress was unlikely - but gave us this salve last year as a way to forstall necessary changes which would have made it look like the failure it is. And that was intolerable in the year-18 months leading up to the 2008 election.
So once again, just like putting Patreaus in charge in the first place, our 'changes' are driven not by need or nobility - but crass political theatre.
Disgusting.
just in case any of you think "The Surge" is working for much...read on
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/
2...in3949573.shtml
Last summer I had a picnic dinner in Chillicothe, Missouri, on my way to a family reunion. It is a small town in southern Missouri near the Ozarks, the kind of place where the park has a bandstand and people still use gun racks on the back windows of their pickup trucks. There aren't very many bumper stickers there, but every single one you see has a patriotic theme. Not an "Impeach Cheney" or "End the war" sticker in sight.
I suppose you might think of something like Cloquet, but with a more southern feel.
After lunch in the park, my wife and I relaxed a bit before heading down the road, just spent a few minutes watching the young guys kick up gravel with their trucks as they tried to get the girls to notice them. Lots of testosterone there.
I remember feeling profoundly sad. So much youthful energy and bravado, and much of it was going off to war in Iraq. Again, like Cloquet and thousands and thousands of other small towns scattered across the United States. These young guys shouldn't be going off to kill or be killed. They should be making love and starting families and trying to figure out what they wanted to do with their lives. They should be seeing sunsets and smelling fresh-cut alfalfa. They should stay with us here, in the land of the living, neither crossing to the side of Death, nor inhabiting the netherworld of PTSD or other injury, which is neither quite life nor death.
What have we done to these young men and women? They were so full of life and restlessness, ready for anything. And we have sent them away, and so many of them will never come back, and others will come back only as shadows.
Flash, I am so sorry, so deeply sorry. I wish I had some idea how I could help.
Charley, not to mention the horrific impact of somewhere between 200,000 to 500,000 civilian deaths in 5 years we've been in Iraq.
If we took a proportional death toll here, as Iraq is 1/12th our size in population, that would mean we'd have had 2.4 Million to 6 Million DEATHS. I wonder what we'd think of that as, 10 times as many as we had during the Civil War.. I wonder. We'd probably call it the worst war in our history (certainly), a terrible price (certainly), and a terrible legacy of distruction and strife.. THIS is the stability we provided, a death toll from 4 to 10 times higher than our own civil war.
Something to have a parade about, I'm sure.
There have been many bad wars in world history (ours and those of other industrialized countries), just a few of which include the French "Indochina Conflict/War," which became an only slightly altered replica of itself when the French left and we entered, at which point the name changed to the "Vietnam Conflict/War"; also "Iraq II"; many of the wars of historical empires on the decline; etc. Most of these bad wars have a few things in common, which can be traced backward from the "sour" point to the initial invasion:
--As the war turns sour, the definition of "success" shifts and blurs to the point where it becomes a way of describing lessening (but not ceasing) troop casualties alone--without any real social, political, or cultural progress. In other words, "success" becomes defined as lessening the overall bleeding...somewhat...and nothing more.
--The above point suggests a few other things, one of which is that the stronger, more powerful country fighting the war (one country is usually stronger than the other, though not always) had no idea how to win it beyond initial battlefield tactics and force, which suggests a lack of understanding regarding the fact that initial strategic battles represent only a small part of winning a war.
--Moving still further back in time from the above point comes this one: the more powerful country most likely entered the war (if it is a war of choice) based on a lack of understanding on the part of its leaders that geopolitics and relations between different regions of the world are today as they have been for millenia: complex. It may even be the case that these leaders have very little grasp of the world beyond their borders at all, and assume that their views of their own lives and culture (which may or may not be accurate) are the way people in most of the rest of the world view their lives and cultures.
This sort of sounds like Iraq II, doesn't it?
Hass,
The irony that Rumsfeld commented that "you go to war with the army you have" positioned against the reality that we went to war with an Army in many ways unready to do the actual difficult part of the job, and unready mostly because Rumsfeld didn't in any way seek to prepare it for such a fight prior to putting it into the policing role, should never be lost.
We had an army that primarily was ready to fight armor/mech forces in the field - NOT to police a civilian populace that fought it from the shadows. DS1 trained it to use heavy firepower to kill Iraqi armor. We sent armored columns deep into Iraq without peripheral security - and saw the beginnings of our greatest weakness, namely that we didn't fully appreciate or understand the determination of the Iraqi people to both oppose our presence, and to use unconventional warfare strategies to fight us.
We've adapted (of course), though the administration - and it's bootlicking faithful - didn't adapt until forced - and always reflected profound contempt for the plight of Iraqis - an attitude that GREATLY exacerbated our challenges in Iraq. The attitude of the troops reflected the attitude of the leadership, and until 2006, the leadership from the White House through the Pentagon and down to the troops - reflected contempt. No wonder we saw Abu Ghraib abuses - and the fact there were similar tactics used worldwide.
This 'surge' may have met with some smaller successes since last year - but I doubt very much things will be improving significantly over the next 12 months. There's simply little evidence that past the successes of last summer - that things are continuing any course of improvement - and the political landscape is not improving at all. No progress has been made of any substance, NONE.
Leftster--
Your comments remind me (at least somewhat) of our country's still relatively recent Vietnam War, a war in which, depending on how one looks at it, we either a.) won every strategically planned major battle, or b.) won nearly every strategically planned major battle (the Tet Offensive was, of course, planned by the other side).
Yet the outcome of that war was hardly what one could call a victory.
I, like others, am not in the business of trying to criticize endlessly my country; I'm simply fed up with our apparent unwillingness to adjust proactively to geopolitical realities that have become obvious for the past, say, forty years or so. Our reluctance to work to create new solutions to deal with the global realities with which we are faced runs alarmingly counter our best national trait: our innovative spirit. We're stuck in a taciturn rut, and it's creating a lot of damage, both here and abroad.
I am heartened by the fact that others feel the same way.
That should have read: "...runs alarmingly counter to our best national trait...."
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