Oh What a Lovely War!
April 23rd, 2007
By SHAUN MULLEN, TMV Columnist
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There have been six American strategies in the four-plus years of the Mess in Mesopotamia.
We are now in the midst of what Iraq war veteran Phillip Carter calls Plan F, the sixth and penultimate strategy, which is known as the Surge. But as sure as Muslims face Mecca when they pray, there will be a seventh and final strategy — Plan G as in Get The Hell Out. And because the surge is failing, there is the nagging question of when that retreat might ensue and what Iraq’s fate will be when it does.
En route to Iraq last Friday, Robert Gates told reporters that “The clock is ticking,” that it’s time for the Baghdad government to get its act together and that President Bush’s patience is finite.
Perhaps the defense secretary was getting a little overbaked from the sun as he stood on the tarmac, because the last thing Bush wants is for the clock to begin ticking — the very prescription for getting the hell out in the Democrat-crafted spending bills now before Congress that he vows to veto — because that would mean that his Forever War won’t be forever.
Under the Bush administration’s perverse calculus, there is no alternative to a Forever War because the notion that the Americans can only stand down when the Iraqs stand up remains paramount, if threadbare. This is the small beer version of what once was unabashedly defined by the White House as “victory.”
The alternative, the selfsame White House tells us, would be to pack up the old unarmored Humvee and head home, leaving Iraq in the hands of sectarian wackjobs, terrorists, gangsters, black marketeers and preverts of every stripe.
Most notable of these reprobates is Al Qaeda, the deadliest of the Sunni insurgent groups, which has been making Swiss cheese of Plan F with 11 suicide bomb attacks last week inside the vaunted Baghdad surge perimeter. A close second is Moqtada Al-Sadr, the virulently anti-American Shiite cleric.
This Sunni-on-Shiite carnage has gone on as U.S. troops supervise a hitherto unpublicized aspect of Plan F — the feverish construction of a three-mile long admission of failure in the form of a Berlin Wall-esque barricade right through the heart of the capital in a desperate effort to try to keep the Sunni Hatfields and Shiite McCoys apart. Wait! There’s more. It turns out that the Stand Up-Stand Down plan has undergone an undisclosed downsizing. Training the Iraqi Army to stand up is no longer a priority, meaning that it will still be unable to do much more than wipe its ass with or without the Americans.
Yet staying the course becomes more unappealing every day, and it’s not because of a toilet paper shortage.
Please click here to read more at Kiko’s House.
This entry was posted on Monday, April 23rd, 2007 at 3:11 am and is filed under Al Qaeda, George W. Bush, Iraq, Military, Congress. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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