What are you the same person? Where do they come from?
People, we can have intelligent conversations about the war if you bring specific stuff to the table. But when you bring ridiculous allegations and try to pass them as fact then your credibility will be suspect. Then to compound the matter by having a random "New user" show up in the thread and parrot the same ideals as the poster, then all credibility is lost and no one will take you seriously.
Posted on Wed, Jan. 10, 2007
U.S. AT WAR COMMENTARY
Best hope now for Iraq is to salvage something
By DAVID BROOKS
Columnist
Picture the person you love most in the world. Now imagine that person shredded by a bomb or dropped off one morning in the gutter with holes drilled through the back of the head.
Imagine your lifelong rage and the terror of not knowing who will die next. Now imagine this has happened to someone in nearly every family on your block, and on the next block, and in the whole town.
This is Iraqi society.
And yet Gen. George Casey and Gen. John Abizaid wanted to put the burden of nation-building on the victims and initiators of this maelstrom. U.S. war strategy for the past three years has been to lighten the American footprint in Iraq and compel Iraqis to undertake the policing tasks we ourselves couldnÂ’t accomplish.
Over this time a chorus has arisen to oppose this strategy. The members of this chorus argue that itÂ’s simply unrealistic to expect human beings in these circumstances to become impartial nation-builders. They have argued, since the summer of 2003, that the United States must commit more troops to establish security before anything else becomes possible.
For more than three years, President Bush sided with the light-footprint school. He did so for personal reasons, not military ones. Casey and Abizaid are impressive men, and Bush deferred to their judgment.
But sometimes good men make bad choices, and it is now clear that the light-footprint approach has been a disaster. If the United States had committed more troops and established security back in 2003, when, as Fareed Zakaria of Newsweek recently reminded us, the Coalition Provisional Authority had 70 percent approval ratings, history would be different.
It is now 2007, and Bush has finally replaced Donald Rumsfeld, Casey and Abizaid. The question now is whether the policy that should have been implemented in 2003 can still be implemented four years on.
Many in and out of the administration think so, hence all the talk about a surge — putting 20,000 more troops into Baghdad.
Unfortunately, if the goal is to create a stable, unified Iraq, the surge is a good policy three years too late.
For that surge to succeed now, it would have to accomplish the following tasks: compel the Maliki government to deliver public services in a nonsectarian way; convert the Shiite theocrats who now dominate the Iraqi government into ecumenical multiculturalists; persuade the rabid Sunni leaders to accept a dependent role in the new Iraq; induce the traumatized Iraqi people to hang together as the blood flows; and sustain American political support for a policy that begins with a 17 percent approval rating.
The odds that the surge can accomplish these tasks are vanishingly small.
But another surge may be realistic. This surge would begin by giving up the dream of national reconciliation and acknowledging that Iraq is in the process of dividing itself.
Perhaps it’s time to merge the military Plan B — the surge — with a political Plan B — flexible decentralization. That would mean using adequate force levels to help those who are returning to sectarian homelands. It would mean erecting buffers between populations where possible and establishing order in areas that remain mixed.
We canÂ’t turn back time. But if the disintegration of Iraqi society would be a political and humanitarian disaster, perhaps we should finally commit military resources, and create a political strategy, commensurate with the task of salvaging something.
©2007 The New York Times
