George W. Bush, on an aircraft carrier, under a "Mission Accomplished" banner, in
March of 2003:
"Major combat operations in Iraq have ended."
Now, major combat operations have resumed. Phil Carter of
Intel Dump writes:
The attack on Samarra is one more indicator that major combat operations — of the kind supposedly ceased on 1 May 03 — have resumed. This is no small counter-insurgency operation, nor is it a delicate cordon-and-search operation aimed at finding certain persons or weapons caches. This is a deliberate attack being fought by a brigade-sized element supported by brigade, divisional and joint fires, in conjunction with a coordinated civil-military effort by the Iraqis and U.S. forces. It is, in essence, a major combat operation, according both to U.S. doctrine and common sense.
This quagmire is due to the incessant failure of George Bush. As Carter writes later in the same post (emphasis added):
So why does it matter that we're back at war? Well, if you're the type who likes to keep score, it matters. If you're going to judge this president on his wartime record, it matters. This administration, though a series of major miscalculations, has snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. Our best hope in Iraq is to leave some sort of lasting democratic government there and to set up the Iraqis as best we can to manage their own security mess. But hope is not a method, and this will be a gamble. Nonetheless, I do not see any way for the U.S. to impose order on Iraq, short of committing 2-4 times as many troops as we have there now and imposing absolute U.S.-controlled martial law on the country. And even then, we would continue to bleed slowly from IED attacks and ambushes on a regular basis. There aren't a lot of good options out there — just varying degrees of bad ones. The tough part is picking the least bad option that will not lead to a failed state of Iraq that we must come back to again in 5 or 10 years.
Thanks for screwing everything up so abjectly, George W. Bush.
No comments:
Post a Comment