Tim has already touched on the Decider’s decision to send more troops and the refusal to re-evaluate his decision despite the fact that pretty much everyone in the world except for the readers of Hugh Hewitt and Red State think a change in strategy is needed, but I thought I would throw this out there:
Saying we can not set firm dates for withdrawal because the terrorists will just wait us out is pointless, since the terrorists already know how long they have to wait- January 2009.
Discuss.
SomeCallMeTim
I seem to recall that when the US was thinking of going into Vietnam to replace the French, some North Vietnamese (or Communist–I don’t have a good sense of the time line) leader asked, “How many years of war do you want? 10? 20? We’re happy to oblige.” We can’t out-wait the people fighting us: they live there. How long has Israel had a problem with the Palestinians?
Steve
I never understood this incredibly stupid meme that “the terrorists will wait us out.”
If we announced that we’re leaving in December 2007, “the terrorists” would just lay low until then? Well gosh, we should make that announcement, a lot fewer people will die if the terrorists are laying low!
This is almost as stupid as the talking point that “if we leave, the terrorists will follow us home,” as though they’re going to stow away in the cargo hold. The problem is, the blind loyalty of war supporters has removed any obligation the administration might otherwise have to formulate intelligent arguments. They could say “if we leave before the job is done, pie!” and all the Darrells would solemnly nod, “Yes, pie.”
John Cole
Unfortunately, I don’t think anyone in this administration has read Streets Without Joy, or, for that matter, has ever even heard of Bernard Fall.
FYI- my unit CO when I was in Kuwait in 1991, Capt. Franchek, made me read that as well as a number of other military history books while I was his driver. I am eternally grateful, big sir.
chopper
i wish ‘the terrorists’ would go underground if we announced a date.
ThymeZone
You are right, John. And your last post is also relevant: Bush doesn’t read history.
He doesn’t have to. He’s the Decider, he makes the history, others will have to write it later.
Heaven help us.
Salty Party Snax
Bush’s only concern now is that he finishes his term before the military defeat he led us to becomes official. Everything he is doing now is done to achieve that end. In other words, he’s stalling.
As anyone who grew up in the elite class the Bush family inhabits knows, blame and its consequences are something to be assigned to the help.
Which I guess means that John McCain is fated to be our next Gerald Ford.
Jake
It also shows an inability to distinguish the different people blowing things up in Iraq and their motivations. To call everyone in Iraq who plants an IED, a “terrorist” is stupid and counter-productive.
Never mind what THE terrorists do or will do, I don’t think they’ll last long once the occupying forces withdraw, I think that’s one reason various AQ splinter groups are desperate to keep the occupiers around. Not only does it provide them with lots of foreign targets, it keeps the citizens from kicking their arses.
Do I think the Sunni and the Shia and all will join hands and sing Kumbaya once the occupiers depart? It is to laugh. However, lumping them all under the terrorist label pisses them off and limits our options in negotiating something that might resemble peace.
Yang
I am not convinced that things will change very much in January of 2009. I guess time will tell.
Tsulagi
I don’t want to hear or discuss any of that surrender monkey withdrawal shit or lessons learned from Vietnam as in Street of Joy. That’s frenchy stuff.
What I’m all pins and needles excited about is the gift we get next month from The Deciderator. His plan. You know all of his elves are working hard, hard, hard on just the right slogan and spin. Sure, you could rattle the boxes now guessing what’s inside, but you just know it’s going to be better than you can imagine.
I’m thinking it’s going to be something like Operation Go Big and Long Together Forward. Yeah, that’s it, Viagra for the RedStater type warriors so they can get their dicks all in a row. Their leaders up front for the welcomed charge. Gotta get the spirits of the base back up and extend the holiday season for them.
jg
The amazing part is when people buy these bullshit excuses and then debate them on blogs (present company excluded, no one is buying it here). We all know the US ain’t planning to leave Iraq ever so these ideas of withdrawal dates and how terrorists will react to them is just raw meat tossed to us hounds. We fight over that while they go back to the big house and get back to the business of running our lives. It feels good to be a prole, its liberating.
Andrew J. Lazarus
Mr Cole, I thought I was the only person left who remembered Bernard Fall. I went to grade school with his daughter, a year ahead of her. Back then no-father families were unusual, and my parents told me who her father had been.
When I saw some of his books in a used-book store many years later, I bought them. Read them too. I’ve asked some of the Iraq-is-doing-great crowd how tax collections are going there, and in Afghanistan. It was Fall, describing just how successful North Vietnam’s infiltration had been in the early 1960s, who taught me that metric for government effective control.
Yeah, it’s a safe bet none of the neoclowns read Fall, and for damn sure not the 101st Chairborne over at Red State. After all, he was French.
I wonder if I should Google for his daughter. I hadn’t yet discovered girls and have this vague recollection I wasn’t friendly to her at a time of her loss.
SeesThroughIt
Yes, and it is all the terrorist-loving Democrats’ fault. If they hadn’t weaseled their way into office, then we’d never have to consider anything but staying the course. We’d have a fully Republican government committed to keeping us in Iraq with no end in sight. And that would show those terrorists what’s what!
joedokes
What makes you think that we will withdraw in 2009? Explain which Presidential contender will win the Presidency, and then withdraw forces from Iraq. McCain? Romney? Giuliani? Clinton as the first female president? Edwards or Obama with no “real” foreign policy records? I want to hear a plausible scenario for removing the vast majority of US troops from Iraq during the next presidential administration.
Zifnab
Nah, they’d just increase the violence to sway our elections like they always do. Terrorists influence our elections because they hate our freedom.
And it’s worth noting how Nixon took his sweet ass time getting out of Vietnam. Five years, wasn’t it? Because we needed to have “Peace with Honor” whatever the hell that means. Kerry basically said as much when he was running for Prez back in ’04. He had to lose an election before he got the hint, that America doesn’t want to be in Iraq more than it cares about political dirty tricks or voodoo economics.
One of the reasons I’m NOT a big Hillary supporter hinges on my disbelief that she will get us out of Iraq without playing politics with it first.
RSA
I don’t know anything about military history, but I’m wondering what’s happened in the past when some country has announced they’re withdrawing from another, in the middle of a war. For example, did the level of fighting in Afghanistan change when the Soviets announced a withdrawal, taking two years to do it?
scarshapedstar
I’d imagine the number of attacks tends to go up when you know the occupier is more concerned with getting the fuck out than with shooting back. See also, Highway of Death.
cleek
I imagine attacks will go up with the addition of 20-30K additional troops inside Baghdad.
TenguPhule
It involves helicopters fleeing from the Green Zone with RPGs being shot up their ass the entire way to the border.
The other half involves a ground route driving through a minefield of IEDs back to Kuwait.
And that’s my most optimistic scenerio.
Worst case, a lot of them never leave Baghdad at all unless it’s in bodybags sorted by body part.
Mary
I had never heard of Bernard Fall before today (and now I have to get his books from the library), but here’s an excerpt from an interview with his widow in which she describes tax collection as a metric of control (as alluded to by Lazarus above), as well as his dogged use of data from other public documents:
cleek
as Josh Marshall said: is this a surge, or a ratchet ?
if, as everybody expects, things aren’t better after the ‘surge’, does anyone really think we’ll withdraw those 20-30K troops and go back to the current size ? or, are they there for the duration…
Zifnab
That’s some smart shit. Reminds me of Freakanomics.
DougL
See! Things ARE going great in Iraq. What else do you need to know? </snark>
Abram
You know, announcing a time line for withdrawal would probably help, not hinder security in the long run. With an announced date, the Iraqi government and security forces has a much stronger incentive to get their shit together since they know that they can’t rely on us forever. Of course, with Bush at the helm, the Iraqis know that we won’t withdraw for a while and as such, don’t have as much of a pressing need to get themselves organized to combat the violence. Add in the obvious benefits of troops not getting shot at and the army having more resources to focus on other pursuits, and it really seems that a time line for withdrawal is the best option.
docg
The Bush Iraq War has induced a Carter-era funk (malaise in those days) for the nation. We seem to have been on hold for 4 years while Bush saves us from WMD, de-Saddamicizing, terrorists, an undemocratic Middle East or whatever the mantra for the day is for invading and occupying Iraq. Where will we be with two more years of Iraqnaphobic “staying the course?”
One can only hope that the Democrats find the moxie to shut off the war funding. At this point, it is beyond harming careers to pull the plug. Polling indicate Americans just want this mess to stop. Have you noticed how many fewer “support the troops” ribbons you see on cars today vs. two or three years ago? Most Americans are proud of our military, but don’t want them killed for no useful reason.
The Other Steve
We can’t leave now.
They’re having a blue light special on aisle 3 at the Baghdad K-Mart.
TenguPhule
We will leave Iraq over Bush and Cheney’s dead bodies.
Really, their wishes should be obliged.
tballou
What these idiots seem to have no grasp of at all is the fact that a few years, a few decades, even a few centuries is nothing to Iraqis. They still commemorate the sack of Bahdgad by the Huns or whoever attacked it about a thousand years ago.
Sending a few tens of thousands of troops may at most suppress the insurgents while they hunker down and wait until we leave, which we will do some day. Then they will be back at it.
The other thing these idiots don’t get is this is exactly what we (i.e. true Americans) would do if the tables were turned. Why is this so hard for them to understand? We would be creating bloody hell for any occupying army for as long as it took, and no amount of troop “surges” or puppet governments or anything else would stop us.
croatoan
Well, he is a History major.
Speaking of “the decider,” don’t forget the full quote:
Fed up!
Right! Bush had no foreign policy experience and look where he got us. As if foreign policy experience is a metric that we can use to determine the quality of the new president. Lincoln served, what 2 terms in the House, before coming President? And Buchanan before him had been in the government at several different levels and had probably the WORSE president. As if 9/11 automatically made Bush a foreign policy expert. Whatever.
scarshapedstar
Dude, he flew dangerous patrols over international waters in the shark-filled Gulf of Mexico.
sglover
This just in: “Clusterfuck” doesn’t begin to capture the surreality of the Green Zone jailbreak.
p.lukasiak
This is almost as stupid as the talking point that “if we leave, the terrorists will follow us home,”
which, of course, is uttered in the same breath as “if we leave, the terrorists will set up bases in Iraq”
Now, where the terrorists will really go is to Afghanistan, where there will be more American soldiers to attack. Which is why we need to talk to Iran — since all an al Qaeda type will need is a compass because literally all you have to do is head east from just about anywhere in Iraq, and you walk through Iran into Afghanistan.
So, we can either make nice with Iran, and maybe keep those al Qaeda fighters out of Afghanistan, or we can continue to piss off Iran, in which case they’ll act like they don’t know that a couple of thousand al Qaeda fighters are making their way to Afghanistan via their country.
Andrew J. Lazarus
On second thought, this Administration might not have understood a book without pictures. No matter. They could have learned everything they needed to know about avoiding Iraq from Bartholomew and the Oobleck.
Pooh
Well, there is some truth to that, though not how W means it. Elections have consequences, bitches.
eric
Had not thought of Fall as well in many years, in my mind he was brilliant in his analysis of why the French were failing in Vietnam in the 50’s. Of course no one listened to him in the 60’s so I don’t think that any one in the WH would even give to look at him today.
Newport 9
I was going to comment on this, but DougL beat me to it.
CaseyL
Well, considering that the Iraq-is-doing-great crowd hates taxes more than anything else on Earth*, they probably consider the lack of tax collection a sign of Paradise.
H’mm. Pity we can’t get them to, y’know, move to Iraq.
*Except Democrats. They hate Democrats even more than they hate taxes.
Zifnab
Have you ever heard the hard right intellectual who managed to rectify “we shouldn’t pay taxes” and “deficit spending is fantastic for the economy”? These people are our business leaders. Do they even know where money comes from?
No wonder our car and airline industry is in the shit tank.
Redhand
The blockquote is from an interview Bush gave to the WaPo reported in the paper today. This lunatic still sees the conflict in Iraq as one against “global Islamic terrorism.” There is not the slightest reference to the nasty and vicious civil war between Muslim sects, which we facilitated by toppling Saddam and creating a power vacuum with our fubared “nation building” after that.
The man’s blindness and incompetence is horrifying.
ThymeZone
A steady advertising message is the key. That’s why Proctor and Gamble presented Tide as “New and Improved” for fifty years.
Darrell
Top U.S. military commanders in Iraq have decided to recommend a “surge” of fresh American combat forces
Whoops! Guess not “everybody” except Hugh Hewitt and Red State believe more troops are needed