$78,100
Posted by tgirsch

Noted without further comment.

November 26th, 2007 | I do too have a life, Holiday | no comments

Bush Admits Failure in Iraq
Posted by Kevin

The surge, apparently, was a miserable failure:

With American military successes outpacing political gains in Iraq, the Bush administration has lowered its expectation of quickly achieving major steps toward unifying the country, including passage of a long-stymied plan to share oil revenues and holding regional elections.

… Instead, administration officials say they are focusing their immediate efforts on several more limited but achievable goals in the hope of convincing Iraqis, foreign governments and Americans that progress is being made toward the political breakthroughs that the military campaign of the past 10 months was supposed to promote.

The short-term American targets include passage of a $48 billion Iraqi budget, something the Iraqis say they are on their way to doing anyway; renewing the United Nations mandate that authorizes an American presence in the country, which the Iraqis have done repeatedly before; and passing legislation to allow thousands of Baath Party members from Saddam Hussein’s era to rejoin the government. A senior Bush administration official described that goal as largely symbolic since rehirings have been quietly taking place already.

Remember, please, that the surge was intended to provide the security necessary to allow for political players to come to agreements regarding the future of the the country. No such progress has taken place and no such progress appears likely to take place in a time frame measured in anything less than years. Things are so bad that the Bush Administration is openly telling the New York Times that it is going to claim that things that are already done or just about to be done and whose completion apparently has nothing to do with the real, if slight, reduction in violence are signs of progress. They are like defense lineman bragging about how they stuffed the run after the opposing quarterback took a knee because there were ten seconds left in a game in which his team was up by twenty.

The Surge was supposed to be the be all ebd, the magic bullet that would make all of our Iraqi dreams come true. Instead, we can just add it to the long line of failures in Iraq that the Bush Administration has run up. So what next/ What new pipe dream will they trot out in 2008 to convince the press and the party faithful that is we just stay long enough, if we just get enough American soldiers and Iraqi civilians killed, the pony-filled utopia that they promised us in 2003 will finally appear.

But it wont. It probably never would have; its hard to graft a democracy onto people by force. But the Bush Administration practically guaranteed that it would not almost right from the start. Almost ever decision they have made — going it alone, going in without proper amounts of troops, refusing to plan for the occupation, an over-reliance on firepower and air-power, the poor security around arms depots, the disbanding of the Iraqi Army, the arming of Sunni and Shia militias at the expense of the central government, entrusting the management of the occupation to free-market ideologues and inexperienced GOP hacks and so many more, big and small — has made the situation in Iraq worse or had no appreciable affect. And so here we are, with another grand plan in the dust and no idea what to do next. Heck of a job, George.

November 26th, 2007 | General, Iraq | 9 comments