A New Old Plan

Well, it looks lik Shrub is going to announce his new plan forward in Iraq on Wednesday. Most indicators are that he's going to propose a "surge" in troops in an attempt to "clear, hold, and rebuild" territory. It's been proposed and tried before.

Dozens, maybe hundreds, of things went wrong after the initial invasion and fall of Baghdad. Many of them, like the looting, could have been controlled by the U.S. occupation force but we weren't prepared to do so. Now, Iraq is experiencing a civil war. A religious civil war with wider implications for the broader Middle East. And our troops are sitting in the middle of it trying, and I think successfully, to keep it from getting any worse. But this war is going to get worse. We can't stop that we can only delay it. So if all predictions are correct and Shrub wants to surge troops what are we going to do with them?

Are we going to use the surge to stamp out the Sunni insurgency? Assuming we even can it will clearly be viewed as the U.S. taking the side of the Shi'ites. I'm sure this will be pitched by the spinmeisters as supporing the elected Iraqi government but the government is rightly viewed as under the control of the Shi'ites and their militias.

Is the surge going to march into the Shi'ite areas and take on the militias? We might have a better chance of actually engaging the militas in battle and if and when we do there's no doubt U.S. military supremecy will prevail. It can be sold as ridding the elected government of corrupting influence of the militias but it won't meet with much success. We might fight some battles but the militias will fade into the populace quickly enough.

Either option means we will be taking sides in the civil war. It will bring more attacks by the side we oppose on to our troops in the region. Since the war has wider implications in the region we will incur the wrath of someone outside Iraq. Cracking down on the Sunni means we will be alienating most of our allies (Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, etc). Taking on the Shi'ite militias will give Iran more incentive to continue with the a-bomb project.

The talking heads all think Shrub is going to try for 15,000 to 25,000 troops. Most don't believe it will make a difference. The generals and hawks I've seen supporting it want way more troops and to have them in theater for 2 more years. If ever there was a time this would have worked in was before the Golden Mosque was destroyed. Most importantly, the American public won't support any sustained escalation and for good reason.

President George W. Bush lead the U.S. to war in 2003 under false pretenses. And President George W. Bush lost. The United States lost the 2003 war in Iraq and we lost because our civilian war leaders were fools. They were incompetent, huberistic, and blinded by ideology. They didn't understand what they were doing. They took no time to educate themselves about the region. And we lost. And now President George W. Bush is going to sacrifice the lives of brave, heroic soldiers because he's too vain to realize he lost. He's going to send soldiers to die because he's worried about what will be written about him in history books.

It is long past time to leave Iraq. It's time to lick our wounds and try to rebuild our credibility in the world. It's going to take a long time. It's going to take the departure of George W. Bush and his administration from the world scene.