Posted on 08/24/2007 6:27:24 PM PDT by Kaslin
After months of surreality, the Iraq debate has quite abruptly acquired a relationship to reality.
Following the Democratic victory last November, panicked Republican senators began rifling the thesaurus to find exactly the right phrase to express exactly the right nuance to establish exactly the right distance from the president's Iraq policy, while Murtha Democrats searched for exactly the right legislative ruse to force a retreat from Iraq without appearing to do so.
In the last month, however, as a consensus has emerged about realities on the ground in Iraq, a reasoned debate has begun.
A number of fair-minded observers, both critics and supporters of the war, agree that the surge has yielded considerable military progress, while at the national political level the al-Maliki government remains a disaster.
The latest report from the battlefield is from Carl Levin, Democratic chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and a strong Iraq War critic.
He returned saying essentially what we have heard from Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution and various liberal congressmen, the latest being Brian Baird, D-Wash.: Al-Qaida has been seriously set back as Sunni tribal leaders in Anbar, Diyala and other provinces switched from the insurgency to our side.
(Excerpt) Read more at ibdeditorials.com ...
My hunch is that Iran might invade Iraq full-force next year. No proxy war, no subversion or silly terror tactics.
They know the U.S. won’t do anything about it.
Well at least IBD can recognize what the marxist game plan is, now if they could just do us the favor of avoiding being sucked in.
As the surge progresses al-Maliki's suitability or lack thereof will become a self-correcting problem. Hell, Bill Clinton was the worst crook to lead this nation, but eventually the problem self-corrected. If we could survive Clinton, Iraq will survive al-Maliki.
Isn't that why we gave them a republic? Sure it is...
Let the Marxists hawk their own game plan now that the surge is working, and let our side brag about the surge's successes, which is the same as pouring salt onto the wounded democrats. Make no mistake about it, this is smarting (to quote Cheney) "big-time!" Wahoo...
The real failure in Iraq, new British Prime Minister Brown, who is losing control of his sector in Basra.
I’ve forgotten how many troops Britain has down there. Isn’t it around 5,000? If so perhaps we should phase them out with replacements from the U.S. (Sorry Senator Warner)
It’s too bad it had to end this way for Britain’s involvement, but perhaps it’s time to let them ease on out.
Excellent post.
The hell we won't. We wouldn't even have to change deployments. Except maybe to move some F22's over to give them some real world experience. But it would be a shooting gallery. And quick.
I don’t read it that way. I doubt Iran would do it, but if it did it would give Bush all the cover he ever wanted to invade. We could put the hurt to Iran’s forces and clean up the place.
It would be interesting to see if the people of Iran would like to see the Shah’s family to come back to power.
So this guy does not have the magic touch of Sadam to get stuff thru the Iraqi legislature, but, do you really want the Bolshecrats to dictate what Iraqi society will be like. They already had it.
Naturally Iran can't invade while we're there, and not even if we left with Bush still in office.
Minus those two conditions- I think they probably would.
Ah. Yes, that becomes a more interesting question.
But I would submit that when we leave (in a material sense) we will have some mutual defense treaties in place. Iraq at that point will be an ally after all.
Heck, they might even be a member of NATO. :-)
As I recall it took us 12 years to have a constitution in our country to govern 13 unruly states.
Steve, I can see your reasons for that conclusion. Let’s hope Ramius is right with his response just above. In time I’m hopeful Iraq’s troops will become a solid force.
I would agree. It’s also very important to give the people hope.
It did take us time. It will take them time too, but they have a head start. We’ve seen the system work that we gave them. We hadn’t seen it work exactly like we set it up here, before we did.
Some might argue, it looks broken now. There are days aren’t there...
They wouldn't get 100 yards across the border before the invading army was summarily vaporized.
Don’t bet on it.
"The Retreat of the Light-in-the-Loafers Brigade."
The US elected Jimmuh Cawta and Billy BJ
We have nothing to criticize Iraq for.
BUMP
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