Paul Krugman: The Texas Strategy

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: January 15, 2007
The New York Times

Hundreds of news articles and opinion pieces have described President Bush’s decision to escalate the Iraq war as a “Hail Mary pass.”

But that’s the wrong metaphor.

Mr. Bush isn’t Roger Staubach, trying to pull out a win for the Dallas Cowboys. He’s Charles Keating, using other people’s money to keep Lincoln Savings going long after it should have been shut down — and squandering the life savings of thousands of investors, not to mention billions in taxpayer dollars, along the way.

The parallel is actually quite exact. During the savings and loan scandal of the 1980s, people like Mr. Keating kept failed banks going by faking financial success. Mr. Bush has kept a failed war going by faking military success.

The “surge” is just another stalling tactic, designed to buy more time.

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I'm Underwhelmed

Remember when the mission was accomplished? Hundreds of billions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, thousands of dead Americans, one live dictator and a civil war ago?

Ah, the good ole days.

The president just addressed the nation from the White House library. He needed to offer a healthy dose of reality and determination, and he needed to offer specifics and accept responsibility. He didn't pull off the first two at all; and he only hinted at the last two. For instance - specifics - here are his "specifics" for restoring security to Baghdad.

1. Clear and secure neighborhoods.
2. Help and protect the Iraqi people.
3. Train Iraqi security forces.
4. Increase Activity against Iranian actors.
5. Increase naval strength in the Gulf.
   

Never forget - the number of troops he calls for we have had in-country in the past, and we have always engaged in clearing and securing neighborhoods, and we have always (supposedly) held as part of the mission assisting the Iraqi people, and we have been trying to train Iraqi security personnel since day one, so I didn't hear anything new and inspiring that would lead me to believe that this time it will work! This time for sure! We have been engaging Iran, in case you didn't know, and for the first time in my life all seven Carrier Strike Groups are at sea...But they have been since late last summer. For the first time ever, all are in the east and middle east.

Interesting times indeed.

There were two things that deeply disturbed me in the choice of words his PNAC-lovin' speechwriters went with. It really sounded like he was taking sides in the civil war. The Saudi's can't be happy right now. Bet you cash money Bandar is on his way to Washington right this very minute. He probably watched the speech from the runway in his private luxury jet, and they started to taxi the second those words were spoken.

I also noticed that he didn't metion that troops will be pulled from Afghanistan and repositioned in Iraq. He did say something about the brave men and women who freed Afghanistan from the grip of the terrorists, and we couldn't let them re-group in Iraq.

Newsflash! They have regrouped and they are re-emerging in Afghanistan. So apparently the terrorists can have Afghanistan, but hands off Iraq...

Oh yeah - the oil's in Iraq.

Bug Hunt

Is this gonna be a stand-up fight, Sir, or is this gonna be another bug hunt? ---Pvt. Hudson, Aliens

What 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.

Let's recap the week so far

Today is Thursday, which means that tomorrow is news-dump day, and the closer to 5:00 p.m. the better from the administrations position.

Let's recap the week thus far, shall we? It started with Darth Cheney being summoned to Riyahd by the Saudi royals. They are less than pleased with the war raging in Iraq. And the Wahabist Sunni Saudi's are less than pleased at the goings-on next door in Iraq and the instability that is being fomented in the region. Those 17 Saudi hijackers were not only angry at America, people. The Saudi's know that, but they are banking on the American public not being able to cypher.

Meantime, Dear Leader had a grand get-together cooked up with al-Maliki in Amman, but then Moqtada al-Sadr informed al-Maliki that if he went to the meeting with Bush, the Sadr faction would pull out of Parlaiment and collapse the government. Since they are the largest faction, hiolding 32 seats, they could do it easily.

This left George explaining how he hadn't been stood up for the prom. It wasn't a trilateral meeting afterall, it was a bilateral meeting with Bush and King Abdulluh of Jordan. Iraq was merely a topic discussed in brief.

Thirty thousand troops are being pulled from the violence of Anbar to Baghdad in an effort to quell the violence there and delay the inevitable Fall of Baghdad.

Oh - and Colin Powell - remember him at the U.N. selling this used Gremlin to the nation? He is saying George is wrong and Iraq is in a civil war.

You're doin' a heckuva job, Bushie...A heckuva job.

Shenanigans!!!

From Sunday's Washington Post, and buried about half way through the article:

While [James] Baker has been testing the waters for some time to determine how much change in Iraq policy will be tolerated by the White House, [former Democratic Rep. Lee] Hamilton perhaps faces the now even-more-difficult challenge of cajoling Democrats such as former Clinton administration chief of staff Leon E. Panetta and power broker Vernon E. Jordan Jr. to sign on to a plan that falls short of a phased troop withdrawal, the position of many congressional Democrats.(emphasis mine)

I smell a trap. This is George Bush's failed adventure, and George Bush's alone. The Iraq Study Group (ISG) is headed up by James Baker III, Bush family consigliere. This looks to me to be a trap to shift some of the title to ownership of this swamp to the Democratic party.

Did anyone else want to scream when they read this line: How much change in policy the White House will tolerate? Excuse me? These clowns have no choice in the matter. They fucked up an entire region of the globe that has significant economic importance to the entire world. They destabilized the entire middle east. They overextended the military and they have broken the National Guard. Had we experienced a hurricane of Katrina magnitude this year, that point would have been illustrated very well. But instead of telling hard truths, the family fixer will tell the closest version of the truth he thinks the pretzlenut can abide. Jesus Christ on a cracker.

No, I say let them come up with their own zany scheme. They own this pig, not us.