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Spin
According to this NYT spin piece:
– Gen. George W. Casey and Rumsfeld are responsible for the U.S. defeat in Iraq:
The original plan, championed by Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top commander in Baghdad, and backed by Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the defense secretary, called for turning over responsibility for security to the Iraqis, shrinking the number of American bases and beginning the gradual withdrawal of American troops. But the plan collided with Iraq’s ferocious unraveling, which took most of Mr. Bush’s war council by surprise.
– Bush/Cheney were "uneasy" with that strategy for the last year:
Over the past 12 months, as optimism collided with reality, Mr. Bush increasingly found himself uneasy with General Casey’s strategy.
– Casey now gets fired:
Mr. Bush seems all but certain not only to reverse the strategy that General Casey championed, but also to accelerate the general’s departure from Iraq …
– Bush/Cheney, smart as they are, did start a new initiative back in September:
By mid-September, Mr. Bush was disappointed with the results in Iraq and signed off on a complete review of Iraq strategy
– Unfortunatly, politics impeded an earlier implementation:
Many of Mr. Bush’s advisers say their timetable for completing an Iraq review had been based in part on a judgment that for Mr. Bush to have voiced doubts about his strategy before the midterm elections in November would have been politically catastrophic.
We can certainly expect that this will become the official written history of the coming U.S. "sustained surge" or "sacrifices", i.e. escalation of the war on Iraq and Iran.
Those pointing out that these new facts also show that The Decider hides behind storied "decisions" of his underlings, took a year to change a failed strategy and got his soldiers killed by being a political coward are simply traitors who don’t support the troops.
Where and how will this “surge” thing occur? I don’t know–I only read newspapers and blogs–but the insurgency certainly knows, and they’ve already deployed their men and materiel to welcome that “surge” with a “surge” of their own devising. And what have they devised? Again, I really don’t know–I only read newspapers and blogs…
What am I trying to say? Nothing that we don’t already know: the insurgency is well organized, well disciplined and well funded, and it has no difficulty attracting fresh recruits. We know this because our own military tells us so, and tells us so in every way that it can. And they know something else, which really goes without saying, namely, that the American forces are equipped and structured to fight in a certain way, or in certain ways, and that if the American fighting style was once a little mysterious (all that “shock and awe”), it certainly isn’t mysterious any more. They’ve learned how to hurt us–efficiently, economically, and with a minimum expenditure of resources. And so they will….
But what am I really, really, trying to say? Well, for one thing, just this: that however urgent the sectarian conflicts may become, they pale in comparison to the one conflict that really matters–the war between the Iraqis and the people who’ve invaded their country.
We’re rich, we’re obstinate, and the loss of 3,000 soldiers is something our army can absorb. It can absorb the loss of 30,000, I suppose, because it can always replace the fallen with all the willing mercenaries that billions of dollars can buy (since every man has his price). But there’s one thing we can’t afford, at least in a diplomatic sense, and that’s an open-ended stalemate.
Because it begins to look a little foolish. It begins to make us look….well, clueless, incompetent and unimaginative. In other words, it makes every single one of us Americans look and sound like Bush.
That’s what I was trying to say: the longer we stay, the more we look like Bush. Just think of it: the United States, comprising 300 million individuals, only a few of whom actually look and think like Bush, will take on the visible and audible features of Bush himself. With those stupid eyes and that mangled English. Rude, crude and vulgar! George Will, David Brooks, the whole Beltway crowd–they’ll all start talking, and walking, and and thinking just like Bush–or so they’ll seem to the average foreign observer (not that they don’t already)…. And so indeed will we (not that we don’t already seem so).
And when it becomes really and truly undeniable–when you’re walking down a street in Shanghai, or New Delhi, say, or Kiev, and the man on the street, slightly awestruck, stares at you and points you out to his friends and calls you “Bush,” wondering, as he does so, whatever became of all those famous body guards…. Well, for most of us narcissists, this is hardly a welcome prospect, and when it evolves from being a fantasy (my own) and starts to become a probability, then–and only then, for sure–will we begin to notice that the insurgents are very, very dangerous indeed, and that we’d best be leaving them to their own “devices,” whatever those devices may be.
Posted by: alabama | Jan 4 2007 1:09 utc | 23
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