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November 20, 2006
Big, Long, Home

Pentagon May Suggest Short-Term Buildup Leading to Iraq Exit

Insiders have dubbed the options "Go Big," "Go Long" and "Go Home." The group conducting the review is likely to recommend a combination of a small, short-term increase in U.S. troops and a long-term commitment to stepped-up training and advising of Iraqi forces, the officials said.

Three Colonels, all eager to be promoted to Generals, were ordered to write up a paper on a military strategy regarding the war on Iraq. Their Commander in Chief had made it clear that his preferred political strategy is "stay the course".

So why is it even newsworthy to report the results (a military strategy that fits the given political one) of that paper?

Lipstick to a pig.

Posted by b on November 20, 2006 at 18:28 UTC | Permalink
Comments

It is a common military tactic to cover a retreating army’s withdrawl with strong local counterattacks. That seems to be the approach that the Pentagon is considering.
We are retreating. The Pentagon just wants to avoid being branded with images like those of the helicopters on the roof the US embassy in Saigon.

Posted by: ralphieboy | Nov 20 2006 19:35 utc | 1

Naw Ralphie…. wishful thinking, maybe! We are there for years to come and any short term increases now won’t have much bearing on the type of with drawl you are imagining. We aren’t even close, yet!

Posted by: SoandSo | Nov 20 2006 19:46 utc | 2

Meanwhile the neighbors are getting smart and preempt Baker et al:
Syria, Iraq to restore ties during visit
Iran invites Iraqi, Syrian presidents to Tehran
Iraqi president plans talks with Iran, Syria
U.S.? Who needs the U.S.?

Posted by: b | Nov 20 2006 20:16 utc | 3

ralphie , it sounds like you saw that lipstick and started to drink the koolaid. nobodies going anywhere.

Posted by: annie | Nov 20 2006 21:30 utc | 4

The extra troops are going there to effect the Allawi Coup.

Posted by: John Francis Lee | Nov 21 2006 1:28 utc | 5

Bush iin Vietnam saying, “We don’t lose if we don’t quit”. Who is writing this script?

Posted by: citizen k | Nov 21 2006 2:40 utc | 6

yogi berra?

Posted by: b real | Nov 21 2006 3:16 utc | 7

First major labor victory in the US in what seems like decades as Houston janitors and SEIU win big against Chevron.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/21/us/21janitor.html

Posted by: citizen k | Nov 21 2006 3:49 utc | 8

b real: Good idea, but Yogi was no dummy and Bush’s stupidity is beyond imagining.

Posted by: citizen k | Nov 21 2006 4:00 utc | 9

got g.”I have made good judgments in the past. I have made good judgments in the future”w. down for another variation here:
“If we don’t succeed, we run the risk of failure.”

Posted by: b real | Nov 21 2006 4:39 utc | 10

@annie & SAS
I didn’t say we would be leaving soon: it took the German Army years to retreat after Stalingrad, figting the whole way. Our turning point was Fallujah.
To use another metaphor from business: to fire a bunch of people, you first have to ante up a big severance package. That’s how I see plans to increase troop levels in Iraq.
They just don’t want it to come down to helicopters evacuating the Green Zone.

Posted by: ralphieboy | Nov 21 2006 6:59 utc | 11

The big problem with the coming strategy of training more Irqi troops and embedding US troops with them is language – there simply haven not been and are not enough interpreters.
Flaws Cited in Effort To Train Iraqi Forces

After arriving in Iraq, advisers said, they often were shocked to find that the interpreters assigned to them were of little use. Ciesinski reported that at his base in western Nineveh province, “They couldn’t speak English and we would have to fire them.”
Nor were there enough interpreters to go around, said Sullivan. “It was a real juggling act” with interpreters, he said, noting that he would run from the headquarters to a company “to borrow an interpreter, run him over to say something, and then send him back.”
But he was better off than Maj. Robert Dixon, who reported that during his tour in 2004, “We had no interpreters at the time.”
The Center for Army Lessons Learned study, whose contents were first reported by the Wall Street Journal, found one unit that learned after 10 frustrating months that its interpreters were “substandard” and had been translating the advisers’ instructions so poorly that their Iraqi pupils had difficulty understanding the concepts being taught.

Posted by: b | Nov 21 2006 8:42 utc | 12

Iraqi bloggerNeurotic Iraqi Wife has this to say about where Iraq is now:

In the middle of broad day light, 150 Iraqis were kidnapped!!! One hundred and fifty!!! And you tell me, let there be hope??? What hope are you talking about??? Eighty dressed as police men, entered the institution and kidnapped them…And you tell me a society??? What society are you talking about???
Whoever did this has a plan, a plan for obliterating the Iraqi minds, the Iraqi brains, the educated level of Iraq. This is no small thing, this is not a bytheway, hey guess what happened today in Iraq…No this is something big, something huge. This is a catastrophe. The shocking news sent ripples of shivers among my Iraqi colleagues. Why they kept asking. Why? A question that no one knows the answer to. Its one of those impossible formulae that you can never find a solution to. WHY?
[…]
And now that the Democrats won the elections, everyone is asking of their fate. What is gonna happen to Iraq, people ask. People have become even more worried. I think the elections were more popular than Saddam’s sentencing. The US elections was like the defining moment of Iraq’s future. I asked my colleagues what they thought about it. Many were worried. If the Americans pull out now and leave us amid this chaos, we are all dead. We wont even be able to get jobs elsewhere, we will be seen as the “traitors” the “collaborators”. If the Americans leave, Iraqis will eat each other, literally eat each other. If the Americans leave us now, there wont be an Iraq left on the face of the earth.
Its a mayhem out here. A mayhem. Its one of those horror movies that keep you on your toes 24/7. Forget horror movies, its a nightmare that no one, and I mean no one sees an end to…They want to eradicate all those who have minds that think. They want a country that has no laws except one, that of killing, that of revenge. They want a dark dark country. A cold dark country with no windows to the world but only one window, a window of broken dreams, of broken hopes. A window of no ambition. They want to turn all the lights off and make it pitch black. They want lifeless bodies hovering the streets, lifeless bodies all in black. Lifeless bodies choking up the smoke from the burnt greens and date trees. Lifeless bodies falling one by one onto the ground, for they lost everything. Most importantly they lost their dreams. Their dreams that was a door to their hope. But even those 2 words, dreams and hope has become forbidden in the country of darkness.
The country of Iraq. Or what was once known as Iraq. A black spot on one of those rotating globes. Your son will come and ask you, mommy, whats this black dot here? And he points to was once upon a time, the cradle of civilization. What was once the land between the 2 rivers. Am I exxagerating??? Im smiling sarcastically at you and tell you, I wish I was. Im seeing my own country die everyday. Its dying slowly. Even those who used to laugh and joke, had stopped. Its not in me said A. I dont wanna live, he said. I dont wanna live like this for the rest of my life. Besides, what Life am I talking about, I dont even have that!!!
[…]
I dont like this place anymore, and Im trying, Im trying as much as I can to tell HUBBY to leave. The yearning I had a few years ago for my country has gone forever. This is not the country that my parents talked to me about. This is definitely not the place they felt nostalgic for. No. This isnt the place. Right now all I see is darkness…And a black dot…A black dot on the World Globe…

I see no reason to disagree. Its been almost four years, there is no functioning Iraqi army or police force, the government of Iraq, and the national resistance, are both hog-tied to sectarianism, corruption and the green zone, The people with education and or the means have left or are leaving with their brains and money. On the other side, the U.S. administration is faced with a total fallout of political will, confidence and a broken military. Nothing is left but last ditch efforts at face saving and or the legal implications from the IMF and the new oil laws. Barring any of these, Iraq goes down less like Vietnam — and more like Cambodia.

Posted by: anna missed | Nov 21 2006 9:54 utc | 13

Galloway (I usually eat those, but not this one …) writes:

If I were a betting man, I’d put my money Option Two, Go Long.
The president has so boxed himself in with his public statements about “cutting and running” that Option Three simply isn’t available to him, however appealing it might be as we approach our fifth year of war in Iraq.

Five to seven more years in his view …

Posted by: b | Nov 22 2006 19:33 utc | 14

in the interests of preserving historical accuracy, i would like to withdraw the quote i attribute to gw in #10 above. (“I have made good judgments in the past. I have made good judgments in the future.”) after extensive research i have uncovered the same quote also attributed to one of bushdaddy’s other embarrassments – vp dan quayle. i believe that the author of the collection of bushisms that i linked to earlier was mistaken in his attribution. unfortunately, neither collection of quotes contains sources, though a survey of the number of attributions for this quote on the wwww show a significant number of references to this being quayles. interestingly, it is a reflection upon the united states of amnesia just how much the ruckus over the current president’s abuse of spoken language trumps that of the former vp. and neither bode well for u.s. politics or its state of education.
allow me to add two more contextual quotes from the previous bush regime, in reference to the so-called “first gulf war.”
quayle described the gulf war as “a stirring victory for the forces of aggression,” while his boss, bushdaddy, told boston’s channel 5 tv news anchor, natalie jacobson, “We did fulfill our aggression.” presumably, he meant to say “our mission,” but, despite the family’s congenital predisposition towards mendacity, sometimes acknowlegment of the truth did slip out.

Posted by: b real | Dec 17 2006 3:46 utc | 15

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