With some even more bad news about the war in Iraq, thanks to The New York Times, top Army officials have openly spoken of the possibility of American troops staying over in Iraq for four more years. Joy. And the body-bag count will just keep rising and the billions will keep being flushed down the toilet. So much for the “once the Iraqis draft their constitution we’ll be out of there in a jiffy” rhetoric. Please just let it be a “possibility” and our troops can be out of there some time before I graduate from college (2008).
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Army is planning for the possibility of keeping the current number of soldiers in Iraq — well over 100,000 — for four more years, the Army’s top general said Saturday.
In an Associated Press interview, Gen. Peter Schoomaker said the Army is prepared for the ”worst case” in terms of the required level of troops in Iraq. He said the number could be adjusted lower if called for by slowing the force rotation or by shortening tours for soldiers.[…]
About 138,000 U.S. troops, including about 25,000 Marines, are now in Iraq.
”We are now into ’07-’09 in our planning,” Schoomaker said, having completed work on the set of combat and support units that will be rotated into Iraq over the coming year for 12-month tours of duty.
Schoomaker’s comments come amid indications from Bush administration officials and commanders in Iraq that the size of the U.S. force may be scaled back next year if certain conditions are achieved.
Among those conditions: an Iraqi constitution must be drafted in coming days; it must be approved in a national referendum; and elections must be held for a new government under that charter.
Schoomaker, who spoke aboard an Army jet on the trip back to Washington from Kansas City, Mo., made no predictions about the pace of political progress in Iraq. But he said he was confident the Army could provide the current number of forces to fight the insurgency for many more years. The 2007-09 rotation he is planning would go beyond President Bush’s term in office, which ends in January 2009.[…]
Which means that the next person in the Oval Office will have to clean up this mess. Apparently having to deal with all the screw-ups from the Bush Administration’s very much botched war in Iraq, is supposed to be some kind of consolation prize to the next person to take the oath of office. Nice house-warming gift. This long–too long–drawn out war in Iraq, with all of its failures and needless loss of thousands of lives, has left some people drawing comparisons to the Vietnam War. And surprise, surprise, the most vocal guy making this comparison is a conservative Republican named Senator Chuck Hagel from a little state called Nebraska. (via again, The New York Times)
WASHINGTON (AP) — A leading Republican senator and prospective presidential candidate said Sunday that the war in Iraq has destabilized the Middle East and is looking more like the Vietnam conflict from a generation ago.
Nebraska Sen. Chuck Hagel, who received two Purple Hearts and other military honors for his service in Vietnam, reiterated his position that the United States needs to develop a strategy to leave Iraq. Hagel scoffed at the idea that U.S. troops could be in Iraq four years from now at levels above 100,000, a contingency for which the Pentagon is preparing.
”We should start figuring out how we get out of there,” Hagel said on ”This Week” on ABC. ”But with this understanding, we cannot leave a vacuum that further destabilizes the Middle East. I think our involvement there has destabilized the Middle East. And the longer we stay there, I think the further destabilization will occur.”[…]
Sen. George Allen, R-Va., another possible candidate for president in 2008, disagreed that the U.S. is losing in Iraq. He said a constitution guaranteeing basic freedoms would provide a rallying point for Iraqis.
”I think this is a very crucial time for the future of Iraq,” said Allen, also on ABC. ”The terrorists don’t have anything to win the hearts and minds of the people of Iraq. All they care to do is disrupt.”[…]
”We’re past that stage now because now we are locked into a bogged-down problem not unsimilar, dissimilar to where we were in Vietnam,” Hagel said. ”The longer we stay, the more problems we’re going to have.”
Allen said that unlike the communist-guided North Vietnamese who fought the U.S., the insurgents in Iraq have no guiding political philosophy or organization. Still, Hagel argued, the similarities are growing.[…]
Sen. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, said U.S. security is tied to success in Iraq, and he counseled people to be patient.
”The worst-case scenario is not staying four years. The worst-case scenario is leaving a dysfunctional, repressive government behind that becomes part of the problem in the war on terror and not the solution,” Graham said on ”Fox News Sunday.[…]
”I don’t know where he’s going to get these troops,” Hagel said. ”There won’t be any National Guard left … no Army Reserve left … there is no way America is going to have 100,000 troops in Iraq, nor should it, in four years.”[…]
Don’t worry I’m sure some time in the next four years the Bush Administration will actually admit that it made several mistakes in going about this war (or starting it to begin with) and will call for a reduction of troops, and ultimately pull out of Iraq in two years. Snickers. And as for finding those 100,000 troops, um….draft? Ah, but the members of Congress who would vote to bring back the draft in order to fill the 100,000 troops order won’t have to worry about their children being sent over to Iraq.
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I doubt there will be a draft. It would be political suicide.
If we don’t have enough troops, we will simply make do occupying Iraq with a smaller force. If a smaller force is not able to provide adequate security, we will start using brutality to make up for what we lack in numbers.
In other words, expect policies such as “every time an American soldier is killed, we wipe out a Sunni Arab village,” or expect us to deputize Kurdish peshmerga to “provide security” in hotspots (i.e. go in and slaughter a lot of the Sunni Arab population).
If the choice is a draft or genocide, I expect our leaders will choose genocide.
“If the choice is a draft or genocide, I expect our leaders will choose genocide. ”
Because obviously, when we–the U.S.–commit genocide, it’s “okay.” It’s sick knowing that it will probably come down to that, and we will be hypocrites in the eyes of the rest of the world when it comes to us preaching human rights and denouncing genocide. Not that Dubya or the neocons in Congress give a damn about the world community (ie: sending Bolton over to the UN), but anyway…
What I find disturbing about the comparisons to Viet Nam is that there is an increasing attitude of “Whatever you think is necessary, just not with my child” that I am witnessing in certain parts of this country. Just as many well-to-do parents found ways for their sons to avoid the draft back then, nowadays they are finding ways to keep their children from volunteering, regardless of their actual stance on the war. Check out this Washington Post editorial.
I fear no one has adequately thought this through. *Of course* the drunk-driving C student in the White House will still have 100,000 troops bogged down in Iraq in another 4 years. And *of course* they won’t be able to win, either. Like Bre’er Rabbit in the tarpit, the drunk-driving C student has gotten himself into a horrific catch-22 where he can’t go forward and can’t move back. Look, if he orders our troops out, the fringe lunatic American Century crew will eviscerate him. These paranoid Perel-style wackos are his _political base_. They’re _all he has left_ now that he’s fallen below 36% approval rating in the polls. So the drunk-driving C student can’t order the troops out. But he can’t win either, as the history of so many guerilla movements proves. Carpet bombing, genocide, death squads, torture…all that was tried by far more hardened warriors than American National Guardsmen. All the brutality you can imagine was unleasehed in the Ukraine during WW II and it didn’t work. The Soviet spetznatz went medieval in Afghanistan, and it didn’t work. Psyops in Viet Nam by CIA-trained SEALs piled up heads and ears of VC, and that didn’t work either. So what are we going to do in Iraq? You really think anything _we_ can do will scare people who lived under _Saddam_ for 30 years?
The American Army will wriggle like a snake nailed to the wall, and it’s going to bleed. For 4 more intolerably long years.
If you think the drunk-driving C student’s approval rating is low now, wait until the fall of 2007. Wait until some mother goes mad with grief and sets herself on fire in front of the White House. Wait until parents start fire-bombing Army recruiters centers. Wait until you see million-person antiware demonstrations in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Wait until the drunk-driving C students starts talking to portraits of ex-Presidents in the White House corridors at night and proclaiming “I am not a crook” on national television.
This maladministration is Nixon on crack, and it’s going to get a lot uglier before it finishes. Will the drunk-driving C student’s own party offer impeachment resolutions in late 2007 to save their collective political asses? I don’t know. But I do know that whenyou’ve got a rich kid in the White House who has shown chronic irresponsibility by driving drunk for years and who proven his laziness and gross incompetence by slithering through college with a C average, the result is exactly what we’ve got. I mean…c’mon, people! Would YOU hire a chronic drunk driver with a C average in college as the CEO of _your_ company? What do you expect from someone like that? This is a guy who couldn’t empty a boot even if the instructions were printed on the heel, and who is constitutionally incapable of taking responsibility for his screw-ups, so *of course* we’re in for 4 more years of the same. More death. More lies. More futility. More grieving parents. This is like a CEO who spends his days tooting coke and banging supermodels and running his company into the ground. It only ends when the board of directors gets fed up and fires him.
For someone like the drunk-driving C student in the White House, there’s no option. He _can’t_ admit he was wrong — ever. For four long years American soliders will scream and spin through their air with their arms and legs blown to hamburger and their guts strailing 10 yards out of their stomachs, and it’ll just keep getting worse…and *worse*…and W*O*R*S*E. All because 51% of the American people were gullible and foolish enough to ensconce in the White House a drunk-driving C student who had already messed everything up to a fare-thee-well by the end of the first four years.
Well, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet, kiddies. The next 4 years are going to teach a lot of people some hard lessons. They’ll teach high school kids that it’s not a real smart idea to play John Wayne when a drunk-driving frat boy is running the country. They’ll teach parents that patriotism is now a scam used to lure suckers into a meatgrinder. They’ll teach the red states that there are a lot worse things that flag-burning and partial-birth abortion…like, oh, say, cowardly liars who wrap themselves in the flag before fumbling and bumbling and stumbling and bungling other people’s sons and daughters to death in a foreign desert. And the next 4 years might even teach the news media that sometimes, just sometimes, when Swift Boaters start the old Senator Joe McCarthy two-step, there really are two sides to every story…the truth, and the lies.