President Bush reportedly has made a decision to send 20,000 to 30,000 additional troops to Iraq and today announced a “plan” to balance the federal budget by 2012. As part of that, he wants line-item veto power.
Asked by MSNBC’s Chris Matthews about Bush’s transparent attempt to grab the news cycle away from congressional Democrats and their planned legislation that he’s opposed, but an overwhelming majority of Americans support, Mike Barnicle nailed it.
Barnicle said if you were to get Bush’s statements reviewed by professionals at a major medical school, they’d find he was “isolated and delusional.”
The following would no doubt play a key role in that finding:
Bush also wrote in a rare opinion article in The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday that his new strategy for Iraq would help the “people gain control of the security situation and hasten the day when the Iraqi government gains full control over its affairs.”
Reality check: Sending more troops into Iraq will do several things, but helping the Iraqi government establish peace and security isn’t one of them. The additional troops might — don’t bet the house payment — manage to temporarily suppress most violence in a limited area of Iraq for a limited time.
Past intensified efforts with larger numbers of U.S. troops suppressed most violence in time for elections. However, as soon as the additional pressure was removed, those planting bombs and committing murder and mayhem went right back to business as usual.
Additional pressure might accomplish even less this time. Two heavily publicized campaigns to quell violence in and around Baghdad in 2006 failed. In part, that was because U.S. forces tried to rely on Iraqi security troops, too many of whom turned out to be unreliable. And those were the ones who actually showed up.
It’s long past time for Bush to face facts, as most Americans finally have. His blunder war, his long, drawn-out fiasco, his open-ended campaign to keep from having to acknowledge the whole thing was a horrendous mistake from the start, won’t be turned around by sending in a few more troops.
At minimum, the number of additional troops necessary to turn things around in Iraq — and keep them turned around while Iraqi society begins to heal and rebuild — is 125,000. Bush can’t even propose that because the U.S. doesn’t have 125,000 troops to send, Also, he’s too feckless to ask for a draft and rapid military buildup to make that kind of commitment possible.
Once committed, the U.S. force of about a quarter-million troops would have to be maintained in country for at least five years. Over that time, in slow, carefully monitored stages, Iraqis would have to be trained, fully equipped and assigned to police/anti-insurgency duties in relatively quiet areas of the country. Iraqi forces wouldn’t be assigned to more difficult duty until they had proven their skills and reliability.
The dollar cost of such a belated drive for something resembling real victory would be horrendous. That’s especially the case on top of the $1 trillion already squandered on Bush’s Iraq fiasco.
The cost in lives of U.S. troops would be considerable. That’s in part because our troops would necessarily become the de facto cops on the beat in every Iraqi population center of any size. They would have to be the security force for Iraq’s oil industry, for its ports and all along the country’s very long border.
At the end of the day, we could expect Iraqis to increasingly hate the expanded U.S. troop presence, even as they benefited from a return to something resembling a normal life.
But don’t worry, because it’s not going to happen. Instead, Bush will dribble away a few hundred more of our troops’ lives for no real, lasting gain.
Well, no real gain except to buy him face-saving time.
Meanwhile, as a start on balancing the federal budget a decade after he blew it all to hell with his stupidly oversized and over-repeated tax cuts, Bush plans to ask Congress for another $100 billion to pour down his Iraq rathole and oh, by the way, make his stupidly oversized and over-repeated tax cuts permanent.
Congress should refuse the funds for Iraq but won’t. Congress should refuse to make the tax cuts permanent and probably will.
We need an eject button: There ought to be some mechanism to remove an incompetent political hack from the most powerful office in the land ahead of schedule. The longer Bush is president, the better a parliamentary government model that would allow that looks.
“There ought to be some mechanism to remove an incompetent political hack from the most powerful office in the land ahead of schedule.”
Unfortunately, the American people can’t impeach anybody…
I know that House and Senate can.
Though, I thought that also individual US states could start the impeachment process due to some ancient loop hole and special clause for the states…? Wasn’t there some plan for this underway? What happened?
The U.S. Constitution specifies when and how impeachment can be undertaken. I do not know of any provision for an individual state to do this.
After these years of war, I don’t think “more war” is the answer. Actually, a redeployment of the Iraq troops to Afghanistan might be a good idea.
It seems to me that at this point, all we’re doing is doing standing in for Iran. Iraq is pretty much theirs now, we’re just helping them eliminate the Sunnis.
It is a reasoned opinion to stay and make something work in Iraq. To leave now sets up bigger problems in the future. Pay the price now, it will be less than in the future.
I was hearing of one idea called the “ink blot”, where you start with the green zone, and slowly expand it, letting in only secure personnel, with the goal of making all of Bahgdad a “green zone”. Outside of that area you liberally use air power and heavy artillery against the enemy.
OK, RSF, that might get somewhere if we were fighting a monolithic or even somewhat cohesive enemy, even of guerrilla fighters. Problem is, it’s a civil war with many competing interests resorting to violence against each other and against our troops.
Your scheme might also get somewhere if Iraq’s borders were secure and other countries and factions in the region were warned away from interfering. Problem is, owing to bad thinking, bad leadership and lack of resources, this isn’t the case.
I agree that larger force in the beginning may have helped, but I see no positive outcome now. We must choose the least bad of the several bad choices we have. To send 30,000 more troops in now is to provide more targets to our enemies.
I am no military expert by any stretch, but it seems to me that 30,000 is far short of what it would take to pacify that huge, violent country, and that the idea that the American people will support even that escalation is absolutely unrealistic.