Bush: OK, I've got a plan. No, this one will work, honest.

As discussed in a previous thread, the soon-to-be-former president tonight called for an additional 20,000 troops to be deployed to Iraq to "stabilize" the country and -- oh, I love this one -- fight off al Qaeda.

In a stunning turn of events, he also vaguely and insincerely admitted to making mistakes. (Sorry, but that was not some admission of serious screwups. That was not a man accepting blame for the thousands of deaths he's responsible for. That was not a man with genuine regret.)

Anyway, what's your vote?

Will a surge, or "plusup" as it has ignorantly been tabbed, work? Or is this just one more idiotic effort to save a situation that was lost a long time ago.

I'm voting for the latter. It's just not gonna work. I wish it would, but it's not. The country is too far gone, the violence has been amped up too high and the US is viewed with an amazingly high level of disdain by pretty much everyone in that region now. In addition, leaving now, while it hurts the Iraqis to some degree, probably helps us more than staying and fighting. The only way to win this war would be to wipe out large chunks of that country, and that just makes us look worse and gives the terrorist leaders one more recruiting tool and many new recruiting areas.

I just see more US deaths for nothing coming from this.

 

I don't know why I'm bothering to answer this. But I don't see how there's some point of "no return" that's been passed.

That being said, Harry Reid says he's "at a loss" for what these troops will do. Maybe the answer is forthcoming. I didn't see the speech; maybe some of it was in there.

And to throw a bone to the "This was a bad move from day one!" crowd: Before the speech, Snow said something about "winning the public back to the war." That is simply bullshit. Don't say you're going to win the public back to something they may not have supported in the beginning.

 

This is a political solution. This isn't an effort to win the war, it is an effort not to lose before November 2008 and possibly see a small uptick in the "success." But by almost any definition of success, we cannot win in Iraq. Say nothing of a democracy or the Arab paradise it was promised to be, I do not believe we can prevent Iraq from deterorating into complete anarchy the minute the last troops leave. The "surge" necessary to do this is probably five times greater than what Bush has proposed and he knows that there is no fucking way the American people would support it and the 50,000-100,000 additional troops needed simply don't exist unless we start recalling WWII vets into service.

Winning the combat portion of the war and toppling the Hussein government with a small, quick army was a masterstroke. Trying to build a new country amid sectarian violence with the same small, quick army was dumbassery to the nth degree. John McCain was right about that all along. I hate saying this because I supported this war from the beginning, but it is time to bring the troops home. They have done everything they could, with many giving the ultimate sacrifice. If I thought that an additional 20,000 troops would turn the tide, I would support this surge in a heartbeat. But they are there in a mission that cannot be successfully completed. We have fucked this war up in wars we cannot imagine with consequences that we can only guess at. And I'm not willing to put 20,000 men and women in harm's way so we can run out the clock until January 2009 and leave President Obama/Clinton/Edwards to deal with the aftermath of anarchy in Iraq.

 

Well, so much for the Iraqi Group report. And the November elections, too.

 

It's passed because there's no realistic way to win. We're not gonna scorch the earth over there, and that's what it would take.

PDB summed things up rather well.

 

I'd say PDB did OK. Winning the combat portion was not a masterstroke, though. (I'll avoid the temptation for a pun here.) There was no way the U.S. would lose that part; the Iraqi army made it even easier with dumb strategy. That part of the war made sense.

The rest of it is what's debatable.

 

If I were a Republican who had to run for reelection in 2008, I'd be thinking, "You're killing me, George, just killing me." Doesn't matter anymore what's a good idea or not, people are just tired of this.

 

We entered Iraq quickly, did not destroy most of the country and toppled a dictator with minimal deaths. The combat portion went as well as we could have hoped. Since then.....

Dyepack, I have a sincere and simple question for you: how can we reasonably "win" in Iraq? And by "win," I mean come to a scenario where the vast majority of U.S. troops leave the country and Iraq does not descend into violence and chaos. And you have to operate within political realities: you can add no more than 30,000 troops, you cannot increase spending by massive amounts and you cannot turn the nation into a parking lot by bombing it into kingdom come. Given those constraints, what can we do?

 

I thought Andrew Sullivan wrote well on this:

(Bush) will do what he wants, of course. Even if the bulk of his own party balks, along with the Democrats. Even if the casualties mount, and the civil war intensifies. Even if failure becomes more and more entrenched. The logic of his speech is that we can never let go of this disaster, that it is our fate for the rest of our lives, and that his job is merely to pass it on - deadlier than ever - to whichever unlucky sap gets to inherit his office.

To back this anemic reponse to the escalating civil war requires us to abandon our empirical sense and the lessons of the past four years. To back it requires us to trust this president as a competent, deft and determined leader. Do you? Can you? At this point? After all we have seen?

 

Sally Quinn wrote in the WaPo this week that we have come to a point where we have three choices, and all three are immoral. The least immoral is to pull out and leave Iraq to its own devices.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/08/AR2007010801417.html?sub=AR

 

There was a fascinating story in the New Yorker recently about how we need to start flooding the internet with information and trying to "win" the war with information, not fighting.