And to speak to that point, news reports I've listened to point out real progress on the ground where the US has established direct relations with local Sunni tribal leaders. The net result is that insurgents are being pushed out of these areas permanently.
Which, it should be pointed out, little to do with the surge--or the new (and more sensible, in my view) approach that came with Petraeus. The flipping of Anbar goes back to '06.
Uuumm that view came with and is a part of the surge. Part of the new stratagy.
Side note: I find it interesting that the same Congressmen and women that voted nearly unamimously to confirm the man to his post, are now complaining of what he will write in his report, which he's going to give to the President to read to Congress. As the law requires. They voted for the man to do what he's doing and now want to back out of it? Reliable politicians?
Zakharra wrote: This world is run by the aggressive use of force. Get used to it.
Actually it's mostly run by money, though the threat of force is certainly always present.
Anyway I had a fairly simple point. When Petraeus claims violence has gone down in Iraq since the implementation of the surge, just remember it's mostly summer heat, and he knows that but is going to lie anyway.
Also do realize that the pacification of a few pockets of resistance can scarcely reconcile Iraq's warring factions or salvage the American enterprise. The future of Iraq hinges on the outcome of its raging civil war, not on any recalibration of U.S. military strategy. The shia do not want to reconcile, they want to exact justice for past transgressions. Out of self-interest, many Sunni tribes have turned against elements of Al Qaeda that are trying to impose an onerous Islamist order and appropriate the resources of the Sunni heartland for their transnational cause. But the revolt of the Sunni tribes has not changed their perspective. For Sunnis, reconciliation still means restoration. They don't want to be included in power-sharing agreements; they want to regain control of the state, and they are willing to wage war to do so. We are willing to arm them to prolong the internal stalemate and try to reduce the Iranian influence. And of course the Kurd's definition of reconciliation is "give us Kurdistan and leave us alone." They want partition. The violence in Iraq is not due to foreign fighters or AQ; it's an internal power struggle in which the Iraqi govt. is an active participant and many external powers are fighting by proxy. Only total victory by one side, or fighting to exhaustion, will end it. We aren't close to either yet. Modern civil wars last for decades.
Bush is the sorcerer's apprentice, he has unleashed powers he cannot control. In the meantime, our retarded president has been asking for "more time" for four years now. How much time does he need? Apparently at least until he's out of office.
This continuing promise that we are on the verge of victory in Iraq is like a bad used car salesman pitch. We've been on the "verge of victory" since it was declared in 2003. There have been some minor military gains recently, but though the streets of Baghdad are marginally less lethal than they were during 2006, sixty thousand Iraqis a month continue to leave their homes, according to the International Organization for Migration, joining the two million who have become refugees and the two million others displaced inside Iraq. The militias, which have become less conspicuous as they wait out the surge, are nevertheless growing in strength, as they extend their control over nearly every neighborhood. Outside the bubbles of US military presence, there is no rule of law, only the rule of the gun.
The surge has redistributed insurgent activity but not suppressed it. Ironically, violence touches more of the country than before, with a corresponding erosion of societal stability and government credibility.
Indeed, continued adherence to the surge strategy, part of which has involved embracing the Sunnis as allies, may prove not just irrelevant but potentially dangerous to the territorial integrity of Iraq. The sight of President Bush landing in Anbar province, the heart of the anti-Shiite Sunni insurgency, and recent administration calls to shift U.S. financial resources to Sunni areas cannot but erode the remaining goodwill of the Shiite community. As U.S. forces target Shiite militias, reverse the de-Baathification program and insist on incorporation of Sunni elites in the officer corps and the police, they are likely to alienate the Shiite majority.
The surge may end up suppressing Al Qaeda in the short term while ensuring the long-term failure of America's mission to produce an inclusive Iraqi polity capable of managing its affairs. The truth is that the U.S. has gotten itself into a no-win situation. Washington cannot play both sides of the fence. It must take sides. But either way, American interests will suffer.
Here in the US, young officers are leaving the Army at alarming rates, and, if the deployments of troops who have already served two or three tours are extended from fifteen to eighteen months, the Pentagon fears that the ensuing attrition might wreck the Army for a generation.
The reality is that even if Petraeus' new strategy is working, it doesn't matter. We can't maintain troop levels anymore anyway. Bush is going to agree to a "drawdown" for the simple reason that a lot of troops are at the end of their rotation, and there isn't anyone left to replace them. Who's going to do it, you? The Pentagon has estimated that the number of soldiers and marines who can be kept in Iraq into 2009 will be, at maximum, a hundred and thirty thousand. We currently have 168,000, so that's a reduction in force right there, with *no* policy changes, simply running out of toy soldiers to play with.
Petraeus came into the game four years too late. It's the fourth quarter, 3rd down and fifty to go after several fumbles. Counter-insurgency, according to the book he wrote, requires the emergence of a capable indigenous Army. That simply isn't happening. The Iraqi army is a militia infiltrated joke. The police are even worse. Militias are the real power in Iraq, and they are biding their time and building their numbers while waiting for us to leave.
The worst part of the new strategy is that it requires our full commitment until the end of Bush's term. There will be no plan or actions taken to make ready for a withdrawal, other than necessary troop drawdowns due to unavailability. The new president will be a democrat, because Americans are sick of this war. Iraq is, in the mind's of most Americans, a defective product and in this culture if something doesn't work it gets thrown in the trash. That Democratic president will begin a hasty and poorly planned withdrawal from a tactically unsound position due to prior total commitment, after some hemming and hawing of course. And then we'll get to watch the endgame in Iraq, and listen to all the hawks claim we should have stayed longer. But they are horribly wrong. It's a no win situation, so the best strategy is to cut losses to a minimum. There is no such thing as a responsible withdrawal from Iraq. You can do it slowly and painfully, or quickly and with immediately shocking results, but either way you leave behind a failed state engaged in a civil war. Staying just perpetuates the situation indefinitely, and we don't even have the resources to stay indefinitely anyway so it's simply not an option. Also, this ongoing struggle destroys our moral authority across the globe, if we have any left. About the only other option would be to internationalize Iraqi governance, but it's doubtful any other countries would want to share our burden.
This war was born in deciet and gross overoptimism. We lied to ourselves and to the Iraqis, promising them freedom and giving them only death and destruction. The foul nature of that original sin continues to cast a shadow on our nation and the conflict. It can only end in disgrace, and the radicalization of an entire generation of Iraqis and Muslims around the world. Bush created a real global terrorism threat from a bunch of AQ cockroaches. This monumental failure will be his legacy.
Last edited by Mulu on Mon Sep 10, 2007 2:39 pm, edited 2 times in total.
Petraeus was the right guy for the job and it's a shame he wasn't given command until very recently... all due to constant bungling that's been the trademark of this administration. Heck, even the usually tight-lipped Brit Generals have started to go public about it.
Regardless, it's just too late to turn it around to declare any sort of victory because there's nothing they can really do to stop the Iranian support from flowing in, just like the Russians couldn't stop US support from leaking into Afghanistan during the 80s.
Oh, and for those that think the weather doesn't have an impact I'll state from first hand experience that it hovers about 50 degrees C at this time of year. Any ex-pats who can leave during the hot season certainly do so until it "cools" down.
The attacks will increase as the weather cools so it doesn't matter if Petraeus or the Bushies picked the timeline specifically for spin or not, look at the next 3-4 months for a true indication on how this thing is trending.
Kate
"We had gone in search of the American dream. It had been a lame f*ckaround. A waste of time. There was no point in looking back. F*ck no, not today thank you kindly. My heart was filled with joy. I felt like a monster reincarnation of Horatio Alger. A man on the move... and just sick enough to be totally confident." -- Raoul Duke.
Mulu, at your best guess, all you can say is that ity's a failure? The simple truth is that you do not know what will happen. All you can do is guess. Unless you can see into the future, you cannot know what will happen for sure.
Was it a bad decision to go in? Probably. Are you willing to deal with the concequences of leaving? I hope so. It's not going to be pretty. You say the surge is too late before it's even half way completed.
The U.S. military's claim that violence has decreased sharply in Iraq in recent months has come under scrutiny from many experts within and outside the government, who contend that some of the underlying statistics are questionable and selectively ignore negative trends.
Reductions in violence form the centerpiece of the Bush administration's claim that its war strategy is working. In congressional testimony Monday, Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, is expected to cite a 75 percent decrease in sectarian attacks. According to senior U.S. military officials in Baghdad, overall attacks in Iraq were down to 960 a week in August, compared with 1,700 a week in June, and civilian casualties had fallen 17 percent between December 2006 and last month. Unofficial Iraqi figures show a similar decrease.
Others who have looked at the full range of U.S. government statistics on violence, however, accuse the military of cherry-picking positive indicators and caution that the numbers -- most of which are classified -- are often confusing and contradictory. "Let's just say that there are several different sources within the administration on violence, and those sources do not agree," Comptroller General David Walker told Congress on Tuesday in releasing a new Government Accountability Office report on Iraq.
Senior U.S. officers in Baghdad disputed the accuracy and conclusions of the largely negative GAO report, which they said had adopted a flawed counting methodology used by the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency. Many of those conclusions were also reflected in last month's pessimistic National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq.
The intelligence community has its own problems with military calculations. Intelligence analysts computing aggregate levels of violence against civilians for the NIE puzzled over how the military designated attacks as combat, sectarian or criminal, according to one senior intelligence official in Washington. "If a bullet went through the back of the head, it's sectarian," the official said. "If it went through the front, it's criminal."
"Depending on which numbers you pick," he said, "you get a different outcome." Analysts found "trend lines . . . going in different directions" compared with previous years, when numbers in different categories varied widely but trended in the same direction. "It began to look like spaghetti."
The Washington Post isn't the most unbiased newspaper. Anyways, this is a moot arguement since minds are already made up.
The consequences will be bad no matter what we do.
Iraq has been compared to Vietnam in many ways. Look how that war ended. In a bloodbath. What can happen in the Middle East can make that seem like a picnic, easily. Iran and Syria are waiting to step into Iraq, as well as Al-Qada and other terorist and nationalist groups.
Zak, no, the surge and the new approach to COIN really aren't synonymous. I already linked to Kilcullen explaining why.
Dan, you're always hilarious. I relate what the people on the ground--including Petreaus' senior adviser on COIN--are saying, and you start ranting about liberals always hating Bush and never giving him credit. It never occured to you that Bush was President back in '06, I suppose.
I suppose you're going to tell me that not only is Kilcullen a Democrat, so are the Marines in Anbar?
There's spinning the facts, and then there's ignoring facts entirely. Why is it so impossible to believe that Bush's Iraq strategy has not succeeded? Maybe isolated "success" stories can be dug up, but the overall picture is that the surge has only made any difference in the neighborhoods that have seen increased US presence, the US presence is far too small to broaden these gains to apply to even a majority of the country (Shinseki was completely right, but I spose he's a liberal whack too ), the Iraqi Army and police forces are not only not ready to take over but have become so foul with insurgents and partisans that most believe they need to be torn down and remade entirely, and there has been no political progress in Iraq nor does there look like they have much desire to make any.
That's just the way it is, and if someone can't at least have the intellectual honesty to recognize the facts then we know in what regard we should hold their opinion.
Last edited by fluffmonster on Mon Sep 10, 2007 4:44 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Zakharra wrote:The Washington Post isn't the most unbiased newspaper.
You're right, it's conservative.
Zakharra wrote:Iraq has been compared to Vietnam in many ways. Look how that war ended. In a bloodbath.
A *lot* more people died in Vietnam during our involvement than after it, and now Vietnam is our trading buddy. In order for Vietnam to stabilize, we had to leave and one side had to win. That's an interesting lesson.
Had we done Iraq correct from the beginning, it may have been possible. May have, certainly not a guaranteed thing. But that's all water under the bridge now, because we did Iraq horribly wrong from the beginning and there are some mistakes you just can't fix.
Mulu wrote:For how long? Without a definition of what constitutes significant progress, or failure for that matter, we're left with an unending commitment. For every news report of progress there are two showing losses.
Until we exhaust all our options. And then we call it a day. Leaving the war "half fought" only assures one thing; that "what ifs" will linger on and leave into question whether we could have turned the tide for many many years. Perhaps forever.
Determining conclusively that there's no workable strategy to forcibly democratize the Middle East can still be a positive outcome of this war, despite acquiring that knowledge at a severe price. That will affect ME policy for a long time to come. Perhaps forever.
Well, on this much we can agree, the Iraq war will definitely change our ME policy forever.
Boy did I call this one:
Gen. David Petraeus told Congress on Monday he envisions the withdrawal of roughly 30,000 U.S. combat troops from Iraq by next summer.
Yep, drawing down to what can actually be maintained. Nothing terribly surprising here. And here's a little white lie:
"I wrote this testimony myself. It has not been cleared by nor shared with anyone in the Pentagon, the White House or the Congress."
Well, his testimony is based on his report, which absolutely was not only cleared by the White House, but written by it. So, semantically correct but still an attempt to decieve. Why can't these people just tell the truth? And why is he giving the report to Congress instead of Bush if it was written by White House staff? Oh, that's right, no one believes a word Bush says anymore. They had to find a fresh face to lie to us, one that looks good on camera.
Petraeus said a decision about further reductions would be made next March.
As if it were entirely up to him. And here's my other prediction, claiming success due to the weather:
"the level of security incidents has declined in eight of the past 12 weeks,
Well no shit Sherlock, it's been hot!
And yet apparently the average US citizen is unmoved. Only 35 percent favor keeping the troops in Iraq until the situation improves. That's Bush's hardcore base, the crazy folks. Nobody else is buying this new September product launch (since you never launch a new product in August) of brand Iraq, new and improved, now with more General Petraeus. Using numbers provided by a military that has proven time and again that it purposefully miscounts the data to make things look better. Remember when they claimed most of the violence in Iraq was due to foreign fighters? Yeah, that was a big lie. Why believe them now?
Last edited by Mulu on Mon Sep 10, 2007 6:55 pm, edited 2 times in total.
Cost of the war in Iraq per week, if this $197 billion joint request is granted by Congress: More than $3 billion.
Cost to Pentagon of shipping two 19-cent metal washers to a key military installation abroad, probably in Iraq or Afghanistan: $998,798 in "transportation costs," according to the Washington Post. This was part of a defense contractor's plan to bilk the Pentagon, based on its weak system of financial oversight.
Amount paid by the U.S. military to two British private security firms, Aegis Defence Services and Erinys Iraq, to protect U.S. Army Corps of Engineers reconstruction teams in Iraq: $548 million, more than $200 million over budget, according to the Washington Post based on "previously undisclosed data." The contracts to the two companies have a combined "burn rate" of $18 million a month and support a private army of approximately 2,000 hired guns, the equivalent of three military battalions.
Cost of Aegis' armored vehicles and the guards manning them: Approximately $150,000 per vehicle and $15,000 a month per guard.
Percentage of team members in the $2 billion U.S. civilian-military Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) program with "the cultural knowledge and Arabic-language skills needed to work with Iraqis": 5 percent or just 29 out of 610 PRT members, according to Ginger Cruz, the deputy special inspector for Iraq reconstruction.
Number of U.S. criminal investigations underway for contract fraud in Iraq, Kuwait and Afghanistan: 73, according to an Army spokesman.
Percentage of U.S. military deaths by roadside bomb (IED), 2004: Approximately 33 percent.
Percentage of U.S. military deaths by roadside bomb (IED), 2007: Approximately 80 percent.
Amount Pentagon invested in counter-IED jamming technology in the last year: $1.6 billion; $6 billion since the war began.
Amount needed to make a typical IED (which can be built from instructions on the Internet): "About the cost of a pizza," according to Newsweek magazine.
Cost for hiring Iraqis to plant a successful IED in 2005: $100.
Cost for hiring Iraqis to plant a successful IED in central Iraq in 2007: As low as $40.
Percentage of the West Point class of 2001 who chose to leave the U.S. Army last year: Nearly 46 percent, according to statistics compiled by West Point. More than 54 percent of the class of 2000 had chosen not to reup by January 2007. Over the previous three decades, the percentages for those departing the service at the five-year mark after graduation ranged from 10 percent to 30 percent. The major reason given now: wear and tear from multiple deployments to Iraq.
Number of U.S. Army suicides, 2006: 99 (more than one-quarter while serving in Iraq or Afghanistan), according to the Army, or 17.3 per thousand, the highest rate in 26 years (during which the average rate was 12.3 per thousand). And 118 U.S. military personnel have committed suicide in Iraq itself since 2003, according to Greg Mitchell, editor of the Editor & Publisher Web site; and Army suicide numbers do not, Mitchell notes, include "many unconfirmed reports [of suicides], or those who served in the war and then killed themselves at home."
Percentage of 1,320 soldiers interviewed in Iraq who ranked their unit's morale as "low or very low": 45 percent, according to the Los Angeles Times. Seven percent ranked it "high or very high."
Percentage increase in U.S. Army desertions in 2006: 27 percent or 3,196 active-duty soldiers, according to figures corrected by the Army, which had inaccurately been reporting much lower numbers. The rise for 2005 had been 8 percent. From 2002 through 2006, the average annual rate of Army prosecutions of deserters tripled (compared with the five-year period from 1997 to 2001) to roughly 6 percent of deserters, Army data shows.
Number of states authorized by the Army National Guard to accept "the lowest-ranking group of eligible recruits, those who scored between 16 and 30 on the armed services aptitude test": 34 (plus Guam), according to the New York Times. ("Federal law bars recruits who scored lower than 16 from enlisting.")
Percentage of Army recruits since late July who have accepted a $20,000 "quick ship" bonus to leave for basic combat training by the end of September: 90 percent, part of an Army campaign to meet year-end recruiting goals after a two-month slump. A soldier coming out of basic training is paid on average $17,400 a year.
Percentage of U.S. military equipment destroyed or worn out in Iraq (and Afghanistan): 40 percent, or $212 billion worth.
Percentage of Iraqi national police force that is Shiite: 85 percent.
Number of Iraqis in American prisons in Iraq: 24,500 (and rising), up 50 percent since the president's surge plan began in February, according to Thom Shanker of the New York Times; nearly 85 percent of these prisoners are Sunnis. (U.S. holding facilities at Camp Bucca in southern Iraq and Camp Cropper near Baghdad are still being expanded.)
Number of foreign suspected jihadists held in those prisons: 280.
Number of juveniles, ages 11-17, held in those prisons: Approximately 800 (also 85 percent Sunni).
Number of U.S. reconstruction projects officially considered "completed" in Anbar province by July 2007: 3,300 projects "with a total value of $363 million," according to the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad; 250 more projects at a price tag of $353 million are supposedly underway.
Percentage of U.S. reconstruction money estimated to go to Sunni insurgents and al-Qaida in Iraq militants for "protection" for any convoy of building materials entering Anbar province: 50 percent or more, according to reporter Hannah Allam of the McClatchy Newspapers. ("Every contractor in Anbar who works for the U.S. military and survives for more than a month is paying the insurgency," according to a "senior Iraqi politician.")
Estimated number of full-time al-Qaida in Iraq fighters: 850 or 2 to 5 percent of the Sunni insurgency, according to Malcolm Nance, author of "The Terrorists of Iraq," who "has worked with military and intelligence units tracking al-Qaeda inside Iraq."
Number of times President Bush mentioned al-Qaida in a speech on the Iraqi situation on July 24, 2007: 95.
Percentage of unemployed in the now-"secure" city of Fallujah, three-quarters of whose buildings were destroyed or damaged by U.S. firepower in November 2005 in Anbar province: More than 80 percent, according to local residents.
Percentage of U.S. military supplies carried on the vulnerable "Route Tampa," the 300 miles of highway from Kuwait to Baghdad: 90 percent of the food, water, ammunition and equipment, according to John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org.
Percentage increase of alcoholics under care in Iraq: Up 34 percent in May-June 2007, compared with the previous year, according to the Iraqi Psychologists Association, based on a study of 2,600 patients and inhabitants of Baghdad's suburbs.
Amount spent by the average household in Baghdad for a few hours of electricity a day: $171 a month, in a country where $400 is a reasonable monthly wage.
Number of Iraqi civilian deaths in August: 1,809, according to an Associated Press count, the highest figure of the surge year so far. Surge commander Gen. Petraeus is evidently going to claim a 75 percent drop in sectarian killings as well as a drop in civilian deaths (especially in Baghdad) in his report Monday. To the extent that those questionable figures are accurate, they may, in part, result from the fact that, in the surge months, the ethnic cleansing of the capital actually increased significantly. Experts also believe the U.S. military's figures for "surge success" rely on carefully defined and cherry-picked numbers. The AP, in fact, claims that sectarian deaths have nearly doubled since a year ago. All such figures are, in any case, considered significant undercounts in a country where it is no longer possible to report anywhere near the total number of deaths from violence.
Average number of deaths per day from political violence in 2007: 62, according to the AP count.
Average number of deaths per day from political violence in 2006: 37, according to the AP count.
Number of daily attacks on civilians, February to July 2007: Unchanged, according to the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office.
Number of Iraqis fleeing their homes on average during each surge month, February to July 2007: 100,000, according to the Iraqi Red Crescent Society. The United Nations International Organization for Migration offers the lower, but still staggering, figure of 50,000 Iraqis fleeing their homes each month.
Number of internally displaced Iraqis during the surge months: Over 600,000, more than doubling the number of internal refugees to 1.14 million, according to the Red Crescent Society. (The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has offered the higher estimate of 2.2 million internal refugees.)
Percentage of Iraqis who fled their neighborhoods in the surge months because of direct threats on their lives: 63 percent, according to the U.N. ("More than 25 percent said they fled after being thrown out of their homes at gunpoint.") Iraqis leaving their homes in Baghdad in the same time period "grew by a factor of 20."
Number of Iraqi "bus people" now in exile in neighboring lands: 2.5 million, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. This is the fastest-growing -- and already the third-largest -- refugee population in the world.
Number of Iraqi refugees admitted to the U.S. in August: nearly 530, more than all those admitted in the previous 11 months. Number of Iraqi refugees estimated to be in Syria alone: 1.5 million.
Total number of Iraqis killed, sent into exile or turned into internal refugees: More than 4 million by a conservative estimate, or somewhere between one out of every five and one out of every six Iraqis. (There is no way even to estimate the numbers of Iraqis who have been wounded in these years.)
Total number of Americans who would have been killed or turned into refugees, if these numbers were extrapolated to the far more populous United States: 50 million, according to Gary Kamiya of Salon, a figure "roughly equal to the population of the northeastern United States, including New York, New Jersey, Maryland and all of New England."
Percentage of people across the globe who "think U.S. forces should leave Iraq within a year": 67 percent, according to a just-released BBC World Service poll of 23,000 people in 22 countries. Only 23 percent think foreign troops should remain "until security improves."
Percentage of people across the globe who think the United States plans to keep permanent military bases in Iraq: 49 percent.
Percentage of Americans who think U.S. forces should get out of Iraq within a year: 61 percent, according to the same BBC poll, including 24 percent who favor immediate withdrawal and 37 percent who prefer a one-year timetable; 32 percent of Americans say U.S. forces should stay "until security improves." In a recent Harris poll, 42 percent of Americans favored U.S. troops leaving Iraq "now"; 30 percent in a recent CBS poll (with an additional 31 percent favoring a "decrease").
Percentage of citizens of U.S.-led "coalition" members in Iraq who want forces out within a year: 65 percent of Britons, 63 percent of South Koreans and 63 percent of Australians, according to the BBC poll. Even a majority of Israelis want either an immediate American withdrawal (24 percent) or a withdrawal within a year (28 percent); only 40 percent opt for "remain until security improves."
Percentage of Americans who believe, "in the long run," that "the U.S. mission in Iraq [will] be seen as a failure": 57 percent, according to a poll by Rasmussen Reports. Only 29 percent disagree.
"You have described your mission as 'buying time for Iraqis to reconcile.' How will we know when reconciliation is occurring? Please explain how American collaboration with Sunni insurgents lends itself to this larger process of reconciliation."
/
"Is any increased stability in Iraq the result of population displacements and sectarian cleansing? . . .
"What is the 'bottom-up' reconciliation plan for southern and northern Iraq? . . .
"What is the plan for integrating irregular Sunni forces into Iraq's national government?"
/
"Since the surge began earlier this year, how well has the Iraqi government used the breathing space it provided?
"How much longer will coalition forces be needed to provide breathing space for the Iraqi government?
"In order to achieve American goals in Iraq, how much longer will American forces be needed at or near present levels in Iraq? Is the readiness level of American contingency forces today adequate to meet plausible contingencies?
"If present or near-present levels of troops are needed in 2008 in Iraq, how will the replacement forces be provided, and what will this do to the readiness levels of our contingency forces?"
/
"We haven't lost this war, but we're not winning it. We're hanging on. Victory would be obvious. Iraqi families would be strolling the streets of Baghdad, and Osama bin Laden would be walking out of a cave somewhere with his hands up."
"Instead of that question, let's hope the general will be asked what we so often forgot during Vietnam: Is this worth the cost in lives and money?"
/
Even the pro-war Washington Post editorial board raises some tough questions: "If Iraqis are not moving toward political reconciliation, what justifies a continuing commitment of U.S. troops, with the painful sacrifices in lives that entails? U.S. generals have said repeatedly that tactical military successes will be unsustainable without political breakthroughs. . . . If there is to be no political accord in the near future -- and such an accord seems as distant today as it did in January -- what will be the goals of the U.S. mission in Iraq?
Some more good commentary:
The New York Times editorial board writes: "Mr. Bush, deeply unpopular with the American people, is counting on the general to restore credibility to his discredited Iraq policy. He frequently refers to the escalation of American forces last January as General Petraeus's strategy -- as if it were not his own creation. The situation echoes the way Mr. Bush made Colin Powell -- another military man with an overly honed sense of a soldier's duty -- play frontman at the United Nations in 2003 to make the case that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Mr. Bush cannot once again subcontract his responsibility. This is his war. . . .
"Waving off the independent reports, he plans to stay the course and make his successor fix his Iraq fiasco. Military progress without political progress is meaningless, and Mr. Bush no more has a plan for unifying Iraq now than when he started the war. The United States needs a prudent exit strategy that will withdraw American forces and try to stop Iraq's chaos from spreading."
And my favorite proposed question to Petraeus and Crocker:
), the Iraqi Army and police forces are not only not ready to take over but have become so foul with insurgents and partisans that most believe they need to be torn down and remade entirely, and there has been no political progress in Iraq nor does there look like they have much desire to make any.
