I was reading Kombat Kagan by Jeff Huber and he points out two things that lend credence to the Bush/Republican Cycle of Defeat mentality,
Early in his speech to the Committee, Kagan said, “It is now beyond question that the Bush Administration pursued a flawed approach to the war in Iraq from 2003 to 2007.” That was pretty much the only accurate statement he made during the course of his presentation.
The old approach failed, according to Kagan, because it “relied on keeping the American troop presence in Iraq as small as possible, pushing unprepared Iraqi Security Forces into the lead too rapidly, and using political progress as the principal means of bringing the violence under control.” He also stated, “For all of these reasons, the president changed his strategy profoundly in January 2007, and appointed a new commander in General Petraeus and a new Ambassador in Ryan Crocker to oversee the new approach.”
What a sack of pro-war poppycock!
We can’t say for certain whether our woes in Iraq came about because of inadequate troop presence. Keep in mind that at one point we had a half million troops deployed to Vietnam, and a fat lot of good that did us.
Frederick W. Kagan is another neocon Pangloss. It is one thing to be positive it is another game all together to bury one’s head so deep in ideological loyalty that veracity becomes a street begger that Kagan and others walk out of their way to avoid at all costs. Cost that are carried by boots on the ground rather then the right-wing intellectuals leading the cheer squad.
“Victory in Iraq is vital to America’s security. Defeat will likely lead to regional conflict, humanitarian catastrophe, and increased global terrorism.” – Kagan ( emphasis mine). They failed the day they manipulated America into a needless war and as members of the reality based community know it has gone down hill from there. So one of the major schemers or planners of the neocon’s Iraq debacle side steps his liability for the Bush administration’s failures, but admits Mr. Failure has reared his ugly head and does so without mentioning Democrats. Good thing since all Democrats did was sign the checks to help pay for the failure. Anyway back to the Cycle of Failure which this leading neocon architect acknowledges. General David Petreaus who is in charge of the “surge”, the new plan, the plan to succeed has been in the thick of failure from almost day one,
When exactly did Iraqi Security Forces take the lead in a security operation? We’re lucky if we even can get them to show up in the numbers they promised to provide. At what point were we pushing them to “stand up” too rapidly? Was it during the first year of the occupation? They second year? The third year? The fourth? And why, after four years, are they still unprepared? Could that have something to do with the fact that one of the officers in charge of training them was none other than the boy genius currently in charge of U.S. forces in Iraq, David Petreaus?
If this administration was running Ford or General Electric they would have been fired and buried under a pile of shareholder lawsuits after their first year of management. Yet here we are with a President that called another president (Franklin D. Roosevelt) a socialist. That socialist president managed to win two world wars, didn’t lie the country into either of them and certainly did have the time or lives to spare on a cycle of failure that keeps rewarding failure. If Kagan or Bush or the other brilliant armchair necons out there were running a war like WW II that really mattered half of America would be learning Japanese and the other would be polishing their high school German. Sure Bush’s support is below thirty percent, but one has to wonder what’s wrong with those 29 million Americans that still support him.
The non-stop violence in Iraq is overshadowing a humanitarian crisis, with eight million Iraqis–nearly one in three–in need of emergency aid, says a report released today by international agency Oxfam and NCCI, a network of about 80 international and 200 local NGOs established in Baghdad in 2003 to help NGOs to assess and meet the needs of the Iraqi population.
**Four million Iraqis – 15 percent – cannot buy enough to eat.
**70 percent are without adequate water supplies, compared to 50 percent in 2003.
**28 percent of children are malnourished, compared to 19 percent before the invasion.
**92 percent of Iraqi children suffer learning problems.
**43 percent of Iraqis live in “absolute poverty,” earning less than one dollar a day.
**More than two million people have been displaced inside Iraq.
As the Kaganites try to rally an even bigger military commitment to even more failure they can’t even keep the coalition of politicians together on who’s future Iraq supposedly depends, Violence Rages in Iraq as Sunni Bloc Leaves Cabinet
Asked whether the Bush administration’s strategy for Iraq could be expected to work with Mr. Maliki’s government in such a weak condition, Philip Reeker, an American Embassy spokesman, said the current crisis and depth of feeling had to be judged against a long and painful history.
“For them these are existential issues, and they have been deepened and sharpened not just by the recent experience of the past three or four years, but by 35 years of Baathi oppression and terror that preceded that,” he said. “These are things that Iraqi political leaders need to grapple with: they need to find mechanisms through which they can work together to compromise, to find accommodation, mechanisms of engagement.”
Phil is probably an assistant undersecretary to the secretary of something or other and has no real power of influence. While he’s wrong to shift the entire burden of blame to the Iraqi government he at least has some inkling of the political impetus that drives the violence. A political situation that Bush doesn’t seem to have the slightest handle on. But that doesn’t matter because part of the Iraqi leadership abandoning their posts is just another failure, which in turn leads to more discontent and more violence and more failure next week and next year. At which time Kagan will give another speech, write another essay and we’ll get another plan for more failure. General Patton is once reported to have said of war, how he loved it. Apparently true of the neocons too.
“Do not needlessly endanger your lives until I give you the signal.” – Dwight D. Eisenhower
“A child of five would understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of five.” – Groucho Marx
The Long Goodbye 