Is this gonna be a stand-up fight, Sir, or is this gonna be another bug hunt? ---Pvt. Hudson, AliensWhat the president misled the country into isn't a stand-up fight. It's a bug-hunt.
A year ago the president was promising that by the end of 2006 troops would be withdrawing from Iraq. The mission, such as it has never actually been defined except as ...to win, that's the mission, was supposed to evolve to focus on high-level specific strike operations against high level terrorist targets.
A year later the meme seems to be "Well gee, we had a splendid plan, but those Iraqi's just cocked it all up by insisting on having a civil war!" Guess what, neocons? We tried to tell you that when you toppled the dictator the artificial construct that was Iraq would implode and a power vacuum would suck the civil out of the cradle of civilization.
Pardon me if I don't get on board and feel sorry for the president because his shiny "plan" got broken and didn't work. He had plenty of people making accurate predictions and he chose to ignore those of us who have been proven to be right.
Hell, he's still insisting Saddam was a threat, for crying out loud!
Now the president wants a troop buildup and an escalation of hostilities.
He wants to send an additional 25,000 troops to Iraq, bringing troop levels back to about 165,000. When we say we are sending 25,000 troops, that means that there will be approximately 8,000 more ground pounders and the rest support personnel.
It's too little too late. How will this make a difference when we knew going in that it would take 400,000 to hold the country and it would probably still have devolved to something resembling chaos?
The U.S. troops are sitting ducks in the middle of a civil war. The only thing the warring factions have in common? They all hate the Americans. The people killing Americans are elusive. They have the home-field advantage and they can set an IED or fire a shot from a sniper nest, and immediately fade into the population, unnoticed.
The violence against Americans is ratcheting upward. December was the bloodiest month of the bloodiest year and it only looks to get worse.
I am so sick of people spinning the casualties as not so bad because other conflicts have been worse. The nature of warfare has changed and this conflict has very little in common with conflicts of the past. For starters, this conflict is staged from bases and the troops are not sleeping in foxholes. This is a largely urban guerrilla war and the comparisons they offer have not been. The troops have body armor that saves a lot of lives that would have been lost otherwise - just like antibiotics did in World War II. The number of troops engaged in theater are a lot less than they were in those other conflicts too, by the way - Vietnam had over a half million American troops in-country at the height of hostilities.
In other words, when someone plays down the numbers, they are actually engaging in a little bit of intellectual dishonesty by setting up what is known as a false equivalency.
It's like when they say that more military personnel died on Clinton's watch - they take all numbers of troop demise under the Clinton administration - natural causes, accidents, off-base bar-fights, and they make a bar-graph. Then they do the same with the Iraq war and say "See? That awful Clinton killed more troops than Bush!" It is, of course, bullshit. If you put those same numbers with the war casualties, the Bush graph would tower over the Clinton graph, but that wouldn't serve their purposes.
If anyone thinks the Republicans have been chastened i have a bridge to sell you. They will keep engaging in the soft duplicity of false equivalencies, and it is up to us to expose them for what they are.
