Things I Don’t Understand
For a long while things weren’t going well in Iraq, and seemingly getting worse. We would take over an area, stabilize it, but shortly after moving to the next area, find it fall back into disarray.
We had a troop “surge.” Things got better. The number of Iraqi civilian deaths falls each month by 45%. It’s fallen 70% in Baghdad. Sunni’s are starting to turn against al-Qaeda in Iraq. — apparently cutting the heads & hands off children for smoking didn’t go over well. Car bombing & suicide attacks are down. And so on.
Things are slowly getting better.
So what do you next?
Naturally, go back to the plan that didn’t work & demand reduced troop levels.
*sigh*
September 17th, 2007 at 6:54 pm
My feeling is that Bush has lost all credibility with the American people, Congress, and his own party.
So even if Petreaus (however you spell it) is right that things are getting better, it falls on deaf ears.
My copy of The Economist tells me that things are getting better but I have a hard time believing any other news source…
September 17th, 2007 at 7:30 pm
I have to be honest, this does put a big hit in Bush’s credibility w/ me. If anything, I would have been happier if he said the surge was working & it was evidence we needed more troops to stabilize more of Iraq.
September 23rd, 2007 at 9:45 am
you need a troop surge in your ass
October 4th, 2007 at 9:20 pm
The story is that the political situation in Iraq isn’t making the necessary progress to match the military progress, which was one of the metrics for the success of the surge.
Part of the problem appears to be that we’re effectively falling back to Hussein’s approach to managing Iraq (there is a fantastic [article by Patrick Graham that has unfortunately been largely ignored because the buzz has been all about the cover picture](http://www.macleans.ca/article.jsp?content=20070920_100442_7900&source=srch&page=1) which talks about how for all intents and purposes we’re back to square one), which is not exactly something Iraqi politicians can sell to their constituency. I think the larger problem though is that for diplomatic reasons, we really need Iraq to stay together, but there are huge political divisions that just can’t be overcome in a matter of months.
October 4th, 2007 at 9:21 pm
Dude… you don’t do Markdown?
October 4th, 2007 at 10:51 pm
Damn, I got excited when I first checked out Markdown, but it doesn’t support WP. And as much as WP sucks, I’m too lazy to switch again. (Sorry, MT, your damn upgrade just too freaking long.)