First ten minutes: prepatory rhetoric.
First of all, you were told to expect everything that surprised you.
Second, you didn't consult with anyone. You took the ISG report as a list of arguments to refute.
Third, you seem to be listing all the things we should be doing for Americans, with the death of a few extra Iraqis thrown in for leaven.
Now that was interesting: either support the escalation or we'll have to stay in Iraq longer.
Sen. Lieberman is the only Congress-critter mentioned by name.
He wants to send civilians??? I better keep my voice low.
I figure three of the twenty minutes had content.
Oh, and when he says "advisors" think "infantrymen."
I can ignore Durban and tell you this:
Bush said before we were absolutely winning in Iraq. A week later he said we're not winning and not losing. When asked about the change, he said something along the lines of, "When I said that, I said it in this spirirt...'I believe we are going to win in Iraq."
Well, he believes this plan will work, and I believe his belief has as much impact on reality now as it did then.
A wise man once said "Reality is what left when you take away all the beliefs." Apparently, Bush is what's left when you take away all the reality.
He needs to be impeached, he needs to be removed.
Now I'm going to listen to the call-in reactions on C-SPAN. I expect to hear a lot of people reading stiltedly from the talking points they got in the email yesterday.
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Bush is what's left when you take away all the reality
The American Neo-Conservatives' War in Iraq
Our government, under the leadership of George Bush and Dick Cheney, has gone from bringing democracy to Iraq and changing the face of the Middle East to securing the City of Baghdad, which, truth be known, was quite secure prior to our government's illegal and unjustified invasion of Iraq.
I'm not an expert in guerilla warfare but from what I've read over the years I've learned that when the government's forces decide that its highest military priority is the protection of the capital then you know things are sliding downhill. If any of you have family, friends or acquaintances stationed in Iraq you should start praying for them and writing letters to your representatives in Washington.
Shades of Haiti
If we melded your analysis with P6's recommendation, we could send Bush to the Central African Republic or better yet, Kosovo.
Running? I Wasn't Really Running
This whole "winning" - in spirit - someday - eventually - maybe thing reminds me of Richard Pryor's skit with his kids. Even a child knows that the only way to prolong as imminent ass whoopin' is to quibble over definitions...and the train must still come to the station. "That, Mr. Bush, is the sound of inevitability."
John Robb on Bush's Latest Strategy
"The latest US "strategy" for Iraq, a small increase in manpower focused on controlling sections of Baghdad, has generated substantial debate/commentary in the US. The reason for this has vastly more to do with domestic political issues than anything substantive in the military sphere. To wit, almost nothing in the current plan -- from troops to tactics -- has changed in any meaningful way. Further, the general situation of country-wide chaos will not change due to any efforts to pacify select Baghdad neighborhoods (and even the ability of US troops to do that is questionable given the dynamics of the current war -- see the brief "Clear and Hold" for more).
Of course, the failure of these periodic efforts may be due to an inability to revisit a key assumption upon which the present US effort is based: that strong states tend to form naturally if provided the right minimalist conditions. I believe the opposite is true: that states, once broken, tend to remain hollow and in perpetual failure. The reason is that in the current environment minimalist conditions yield social disintegration (we see will this minimalist/disintegration paradigm repeated world-wide, even in the absence of war, as globalization continues to rapidly grow and spread -- which fatally undermines any argument that the success of globalization means that "we win," if "we" means the US and nation-states in general) and the ascendent military power (copiously documented on this weblog) is in the hands of those would disrupt the state rather than form it. If this revised assumption is correct, it is safe to conclude that building a stable Iraq would require a level of effort that is beyond our ability to provide (see the brief "Playing with War" for more)."
John Robb
"Global Guerillas"