Common Sense

President Bush has decided, after sober assessment of our military and political victories on the ground in Iraq, that he can drawdown 30,000 troops by the middle of next year. I think, this is a reasonable move on his part.

Really, is it so hard to write the truth at the Washington Post? We all know exactly why we’re drawing down troops from the surge. Our military forces don’t have the manpower to sustain “the surge” after April 2008. No ifs ands or buts about it, we don’t have enough soldiers. Just ask incoming Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. McMullen.
Slate did a piece some time back that points to options to extend that deadline a little further, but all of them are political non-starters. He can extend the tours again from 15 months to 18 months (the norm should be a 12 month tour and 12 months back home). He could call up 100% of reservists, but that would create a major disruption in American life. Reservists have day jobs and families and those families rely on those day jobs since most of the people who join the Reserves do so because they are poor and need the extra money. Can you imagine 1 million ordinary Americans suddenly just not being at their jobs because President Bush needs to send them to Iraq? Or he could ask Congress to reinstate the draft, which I imagine might actually spark riots since it won’t be Paris Hilton and her friends on the front lines. Just like with Vietnam, the rich will find a way to keep their kids out of it while the middle and lower classes take all the flack… literally.

No, he doesn’t have a choice but to take troops out and it is poor journalism to not point that out in this story. Abramowitz and Weisman might as well hang out with Nedra Pickler and talk about how wise President Bush is to follow Gen. Petraeus’ Plan.

No, he has no choice but to take us back to pre-surge levels, so this was all a lame fuck around. A complete waste of time and manpower that accomplished nothing. All we’ve done is change the metrics by how we count civilian deaths, arm Sunni tribes in Anbar to make them feel more secure about the Shia death squadsIraqi police and army units that we’ve trained and armed and we’ve watched the national government practically collapse. And the best Patraeus or Crocker can give us is ‘wait six more months.’

Somebody wake me up when we’ve reached 4,000 dead American soldiers; that’s another milestone we can celebrate before we inevitably leave Iraq. It’s going to happen. It might have to wait until the next president, which will inevitably be a Democrat as long as Bush continues on his path. But we’re leaving. So we should leave now, or rather, begin the drawdown and redeployment now instead of waiting out a lame duck president’s term and letting American servicemen die before we do.