Unfortunately, there was one other thing that helped him gain support...sustained attacks on the homeland.
I pray that's not what it will take here, but it might be. In some cases, I'm not sure that even then will some recognize the enemy.
Posted on 12/14/2006 4:18:31 PM PST by RWR8189
THE moment of truth, of decision, has arrived for Iraq. Last week the Iraq Study Group, appointed by the US Congress, made public its report. The bipartisan group, led by former secretary of state James Baker and former Democratic congressman Lee Hamilton and peopled by experienced former political and diplomatic practitioners, gave a sombre view of the state of affairs in Iraq.
The group also put forward new proposals for US policy including talking to Syria and Iran, withdrawing US combat troops by the first quarter of 2008, and deploying up to 20,000 US troops to train and advise Iraqi units.
President George W. Bush has said he will take this report into account before coming to a decision about future policy in Iraq, with an announcement due early next year.
Washington is alive with the thunder of political volleys within and between political parties, think-tanks and the punditocracy.
Much of this debate is about issues that are not at the heart of the matter. For example, whether there should be a temporary surge in US troop numbers to right the horrendous security situation in Baghdad is a fascinating subject in itself, but it is not what is at stake in Bush's decision. Put starkly, the Iraq Study Group, without being so impolite or impolitic as to say so in as many words, has provided a respectable cloak for the US to walk away from Iraq. What Bush now has to decide is whether, even if the Iraq war was a just cause, it is necessary now to accept that it is a lost cause. If yes, then the Iraq Study Group or any other number of models will provide a suitable pretext to slide away from his commitments. If not, Bush has to decide what he can now do
(Excerpt) Read more at theaustralian.news.com.au ...
The only meaningful statement up to this point.
Even though I think we have lost our advantage in this battlefield of the WOT, I still think we can pull it out and claim victory. It's going to take bold moves from W and effectively speaking, he's only got 1 year to accomplish it.
GO FOR IT DUBYA!
"A Churchillian effort in Iraq"
You mean we are going to give Dubya a pencil and let him redraw the borders?
Unfortunately, there was one other thing that helped him gain support...sustained attacks on the homeland.
I pray that's not what it will take here, but it might be. In some cases, I'm not sure that even then will some recognize the enemy.
Sure, we should look to Churchill for inspiration!
There is something very sinister to my mind in this mesopotamian entanglement," Winston Churchill wrote his Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, in August 1920. "Week after week and month after month for a long time we shall have a continuance of this miserable, wasteful, sporadic warfare marked from time to time certainly by minor disasters and cuttings off of troops and agents, and very possibly attended by some very grave occurrence."
[...]
Writing to Lloyd George, Churchill, frustrated after all the bloodshed in World War I, asked, "Why are we compelled to go on pouring armies and treasure into these thankless deserts?" But the British had created the problem, cobbling "Iraq" from three disparate Ottoman provinces. They chose sides, picking the Sunni minority to run the country. The Brits remained there 12 years, bleeding occasionally, until 1932.
We should have immediately stomped the crap out of Iran and Syria right after the brilliant blitzkrieg on Baghdad.
We have been, and will continue to, pay the price for leaving these two intact.
Both regimes MUST be destroyed or there will be NO PEACE.
Thanks for ping.
We don't need a Churchillian effort. What we need is a Nixonian effort when he went to China or a Reaganian effort containing Russia or an Eisenhowerian effort in going to Korea.
Churchill succeeded because he had the US military to carry the load. Who do we have? This nation is hardly mobilized. Look at the reception that would be received for a draft or using tax cuts for war bonds. War is for volunteers.
This isn't Vietnam in the sense that enemy troops are moving armored divisions into Baghdad. It may be Vietnam in the sense that it provided a bulwark against which the advance of Islamist radicalism has dashed itself just as the advance of communist revolution did thirty years ago. It certainly is Vietnam in that defeat has been grandly declared when conditions on the ground are so obviously otherwise.
Good grief, there's even a cottage industry in books full of "expert" analysis about how the whole thing came crashing down when it has yet to do so. It's astonishing. The cocktail-and-lecture circuit is full of well-compensated sages declaiming Delphian wisdom to Powerpoint slides about an absolutely phantom defeat. It would be amusing were it not so openly insulting to those who are or have been serving there.
Gallipoli, anyone?
So we should pretend to be Indians, plagarize stuff, and blame the United States for everything? How will that help?
Oh wait...
Never mind.
"Why are we compelled to go on pouring armies and treasure into these thankless deserts?"
Do I hear an echo?
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