Common Sense

Didn’t President Bush say he wouldn’t accept a timetable for withdrawl? That it was “conceding too much to the enemy.”That it was “cutting and running.” That it says to the enemy “‘Here’s a timetable. Just go ahead and wait us out?’ It doesn’t make any sense to have a timetable.”

So, he’s setting a timetable. Why does President Bush hate winning the Iraq war?

Kevin Drum has three theories as to why they are setting up this “blueprint,”

(a) They’re serious about this. (b) They’re trying to put together a plan — any plan — in order to prevent James Baker’s forthcoming recommendations from becoming the default “sensible” middle course accepted by everyone in the DC punditocracy. (c) It’s meaningless except as political theater. Bush just wants the country to think he’s busily working on something, and this is the something.

The truth is, the original plan was to simply topple the Saddam regime, hand over sovereignty to somebody, anybody, then remove most of our troops. When Gen. Tommy Franks showed up in Baghdad in April 2003, he told his commanders to be ready to pull out all but two divisions that September.

The problems began as soon as the Coalition Provisional Authority started sending out memos. Almost all of them, from disbanding the army and police to the extensive de-Baathification went much too far. When L. Paul Bremer finally handed sovereignty over to the Iraqi Governing Council, it was already too late to just pull out. The insurgency had grown into a real, coordinated guerilla insurgency.

Of course, none of the civilians in the Pentagon would even admit to this in private. It was a ‘few foreign terrorists and Saddam loyalists.’ Not the tens of thousands of out of work Sunni military men who already had the training and weapons that would have been needed for securing the country, who then were rejected by the CPA and were very angry.

And now its not just an insurgency. There are the Sunnis bombing Shia mosques and Shiite death squads dressed as police killing civilians in ever increasing numbers. We have a civil war and no real hope of winning. All we can do is:

1. Stay there and let possibly hundreds or thousands more American soldiers die, then leave.
2. Leave and redeploy to Afghnistan and other areas to contain the threat, which is that we’ve spent the past several years giving a younger generation of jihadists practical training in fighting the American military.

The Baker Commission is expected to say that second one, or, if we stay, to give up on any notion of a democracy and to make the Sunni insurgents part of the government. To me, this “blueprint” seems more like a ‘I’m trying to do something’ type excercise. As John Warner said a few weeks ago, waiting around anymore is pointless. The time to have set a timetable and look for specific results to begin troop drawdown was well over a year ago.

It’s a shame, too, because we need somebody is actually doing something. Our president doesn’t seem to be able to get past how he looks politically to pracitically achieve America’s goals.

Didn’t President Bush say he wouldn’t accept a timetable for withdrawl? That it was “conceding too much to the enemy.”That it was “cutting and running.” That it says to the enemy “‘Here’s a timetable. Just go ahead and wait us out?’ It doesn’t make any sense to have a timetable.”

So, he’s setting a timetable. Why does President Bush hate winning the Iraq war?

Kevin Drum has three theories as to why they are setting up this “blueprint,”

(a) They’re serious about this. (b) They’re trying to put together a plan — any plan — in order to prevent James Baker’s forthcoming recommendations from becoming the default “sensible” middle course accepted by everyone in the DC punditocracy. (c) It’s meaningless except as political theater. Bush just wants the country to think he’s busily working on something, and this is the something.

The truth is, the original plan was to simply topple the Saddam regime, hand over sovereignty to somebody, anybody, then remove most of our troops. When Gen. Tommy Franks showed up in Baghdad in April 2003, he told his commanders to be ready to pull out all but two divisions that September.

The problems began as soon as the Coalition Provisional Authority started sending out memos. Almost all of them, from disbanding the army and police to the extensive de-Baathification went much too far. When L. Paul Bremer finally handed sovereignty over to the Iraqi Governing Council, it was already too late to just pull out. The insurgency had grown into a real, coordinated guerilla insurgency.

Of course, none of the civilians in the Pentagon would even admit to this in private. It was a ‘few foreign terrorists and Saddam loyalists.’ Not the tens of thousands of out of work Sunni military men who already had the training and weapons that would have been needed for securing the country, who then were rejected by the CPA and were very angry.

And now its not just an insurgency. There are the Sunnis bombing Shia mosques and Shiite death squads dressed as police killing civilians in ever increasing numbers. We have a civil war and no real hope of winning. All we can do is:

1. Stay there and let possibly hundreds or thousands more American soldiers die, then leave.
2. Leave and redeploy to Afghnistan and other areas to contain the threat, which is that we’ve spent the past several years giving a younger generation of jihadists practical training in fighting the American military.

The Baker Commission is expected to say that second one, or, if we stay, to give up on any notion of a democracy and to make the Sunni insurgents part of the government. To me, this “blueprint” seems more like a ‘I’m trying to do something’ type excercise. As John Warner said a few weeks ago, waiting around anymore is pointless. The time to have set a timetable and look for specific results to begin troop drawdown was well over a year ago.

It’s a shame, too, because we need somebody is actually doing something. Our president doesn’t seem to be able to get past how he looks politically to pracitically achieve America’s goals.