http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/01/03/bush.iraq/index.html

I have so many questions. A few that come to mind are:

Will it, as predicted in the article, work?

What defines " success " given this scenario?

How do you think it will be met by Iraqi citizens?

What about their government? Do you think they'll like it?

What about the American citizens/families of troops? Do you think there will be more acceptance than resistance by them?

Does Bush have enough " political capital " left to raise the troop levels and expect people to trust his plans?

Yeah. I totally agree with you on that.

I would have been in favor of adding more troops earlier - but I've now become convinced that Iraq is way beyond the point of no return.

To me, "victory" is not possible there. Too many Shiites and Sunnis do not want to be part of a unified Iraq (or want the other side to control it). This is an artifical country made up by the British after World War I. Why should it stay together now? Most Iraqis don't have a strong sense of national identity. Their first loyalty is to family, then to tribe/sect, then to their religion. Down on the list is "Iraqi." Their identity as "Iraqi" might be like the one you and I feel for "North American." Our identity as "Americans," apart from Canada and Mexico, is far higher and important to us. Would you want to be forced to part of some "Pan-America" nation with Mexico and Canada?

We should acknowledge that "Iraq" as we envisoned it no longer exists. It is already de facto partitioned (and the Kurds have been self-governing for years anyway; they don't even allow the Iraqi flag to be flown on government buildings in the Kurdish regions). We should treat it that way, not pretend that it's some big, happy united nation that just has some nasty terrorists disrupting things and then everything would be peachy. That paradigm is completely invalid, and no solution America could implement is going to work.

The only way Iraq stayed united in the first place was through a viscious dictatorship, through the force of terror and government violence. It doesn't seem to be a place, like Yugoslavia, that would wish to remain united without the force of a strong dictatorship.

If we wanted to try to force the Iraqis to remain united, the only short-term thing we could do is send hundreds of thousands of troops there, maybe a million, from many nations, as a big peace keeping force, but that is far beyond the scope of what Bush is trying to do now, and it's not a long-term solution anyway. Adding 20,000 troops now isn't going to make much difference in the end, except Bush may sneak out of office without Iraq "failing" on his watch.

Andrew

Meet The New Plan
Same As The Old Plan

Most Stubborn President Ever.

There is the idea of slicing up Iraq into somewhat equal sections (however you want to define that) and giving the individual factions there own place in what would be a divided Iraq. Is there any hope for that plan now? And was it a good plan in the first place?

Chris, what you are talking about is what I referred to above (more commonly known as "partitions"). Some people like me believe the country is ALREADY partitioned and we simply have not acknowledged it yet. The most important part of any "plan" in this regard is first of all acknowledging the obvious. But Bush most certainly hasn't considered anything like this. He's still in the "single country, just have to solve the 'security problem'" mode which I believe is flawed no matter what we can do now. Flawed assumptions can't be fixed by a change in strategy or tatics, just like they couldn't in Vietnam.

Andrew

The chances of success aren't good, to put it mildly. Iraq's biggest problem isn't political OR military - it's the fact that the educated middle class is fleeing the country (with their money and professional skills) at the rate of tens of thousands per month. More violence, from whatever source and for whatever reason, is only going to accelerate this trend. Soon, virtually the only people left in Iraq will be those who don't have the resources to leave - poor, uneducated, highly religious and very, very angry. On top of this, Bush is aggravating sectarian tensions by not only escalating the war against the Sunnis but by also trying to drive a wedge between the Iraqi government and the Shiite militias. This is something I thought even Bush would not be stupid enough to do. I had been expecting him to jettison the "unity government" fantasy and throw in unambiguously with the Shiites, in an attempt to (a) unify them against the insurgents, (b) pacify or co-opt the militias and (c) dissuade the government from aligning even more closely with Iran. It might not have worked, but in terms of realpolitik I think it was the smartest strategy still available to him.

It would not surprise me if, several weeks or months from now, the Iraqi government collapses virtually overnight as a result of the inexorable trends I have described. Think of a house being hollowed out by termites or dry rot. It looks just fine from the outside until one day - poof.

I may buy stock in some funeral home and casket-making companies. They may be the only ones who benefit from this move.

The current situation only reiterates the supreme incompetence of the Bush administration and the complete miscalculation of the consequences of invading Iraq. Bush is now asking for more troops after completely disregarding some of the warnings by top generals leading up to the war who advised that 100,000 troops would be wholly inadequate to stabilize Iraq after toppling Saddam Hussein. General Shinseki lost his job after suggesting more than double that amount of troops would be required to be effective.

The following paragraph is taken from a NY Times article in March of 2003. It's noteworthy to see Wolfowitz claim there's "no history of ethnic strife in Iraq". No history of ethnic strife? That's all there's been in Iraq. How he could make such an obviously inaccurate and ill-informed claim as that and not be laughed off the podium is totally lost on me. It's but one example of how off-the-mark the Bush Administration was in the run up to invading Iraq.

From the NY Times, March 2003:

"In his testimony, Mr. Wolfowitz ticked off several reasons why he believed a much smaller coalition peacekeeping force than General Shinseki envisioned would be sufficient to police and rebuild postwar Iraq. He said there was no history of ethnic strife in Iraq, as there was in Bosnia or Kosovo. He said Iraqi civilians would welcome an American-led liberation force that "stayed as long as necessary but left as soon as possible," but would oppose a long-term occupation force. And he said that nations that oppose war with Iraq would likely sign up to help rebuild it. "I would expect that even countries like France will have a strong interest in assisting Iraq in reconstruction," Mr. Wolfowitz said. He added that many Iraqi expatriates would likely return home to help."

It doesn't matter, Dems will always go against Bush. See this article from last year.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/14/politics/14army.html?ex=1168578000&en=65adbaaf ab411966&ei=5070

Sohran, which prominent Democrats are opposing increasing the size of the US Military? None that I'm aware of. They were proposing it in 2005 as you demonstrate in this article and now Bush has finally proposed it. Who is leading who?

What does increasing the size of the number of troops in the US Military have to do with deploying 21,500 new troops to Iraq?

Andrew

And, what exactly are 21,500 more troops going to accomplish in Iraq? Who are we kidding?

It doesn't matter, neo-CONers will always go against Clinton. See 99% articles from his eight years in office.

... and the protests from the left
are now coming from the right
And the beards have all grown longer overnight...

I'm in the mood for a good episode of CSI . . .



Frankly, I'm surprised at the low figure of 20,000 troops . . . I'd thought maybe Bush would take 80,000+ troops and go in and clear their clocks!

This is really gonna be interesting to watch from a historical standpoint . . . from a personal perspective, all I can say is: idiot.

(Oh, the troops can come from S. Korea cuz N Korea isn't gonna do ground invasions anymore since they've got nukes now (abeit tiny ones).)