Decius wrote:

So here we are. Nothing's been proved. Nothing's changed.

I don't agree. There has been a change. The change is not as significant as Petreus would have you think, but the violence levels have begun to drop, which is substantial, as they have been going up steadily for 4 years. If we pull out it is certain that the violence levels will exceed their prior peaks. If we stay, it is possible that they will continue to drop.

Well, it's not like it matters much, since no one in congress has a spine, Bush is gonna do what Petreus said and the military realities are going to force our hand one way or another pretty soon.

I just heard NPR's pentagon correspondent and a former commandant of the Army War College (as well as a Brig. General i think) note that the military cannot sustain the current troop level beyond a March time frame. Thus, all of Bush's talk about drawing down troops over the next 6 months is quite literally a simple concession to reality, as well as theatre. Given his track record, that's actually pretty amazing but it's not exactly a mindblowing plan. If we don't we could quite literally destroy our armed forces completely.

It's questionable if we can sustain even the March troop levels for long. At 130,000 troops, that's the same as the pre-surge level, and you'll recall that a lot of people were questioning if that could be kept up for much longer.

This AWC Commandant, Scales, noted that Bush has called this a "long war" and then he offered up the analogy of Iraq as a marathon. My argument (not his, exactly) is that a lot of people knew that, but Bush ran us in there like it was a fucking sprint and burned the whole country out. We're limping along at milepost who knows what, and all Bush has on offer is "At least this section is downhill! I'm sure the rest of the course will be!"

I'm not convinced. I'm glad less people are dying at the moment. I hope it'll stay that way, I really do. I just shudder to think of the long term cost of "winning" this war.

The "Homeland" has a lot of work ahead of it on the domestic front to pay for all this bullshit Bush has gotten us into. He's demolished the credibility not just of his administration but of the institution of government. We're turning into a surveillance state, at best, well on our way to a jackbooted police state. Science is under attack, Christian extremism is reaching new heights and fear fills in all the cracks. And, oh yeah, DHS still hasn't made me feel much damn safer.

Even America isn't invincible. I think we're on the fast track to finding that out the really, really hard way. I'm scared to death, not of Al Quaeda, but of the lunatics they've made of Americans.

So yeah, when I think about Iraq, it's not in isolation. It's leveraged against all of the other shit that needs to get done and isn't getting done, and won't get done while we spin our wheels in a blistering desert trying desperately to get a group of people to act like a country, while they insist on killing each other over a bunch of goddammed religious claptrap.

Whatever. I give up. Let's stay forever. I just hope Japan or France will still take me when I have to become a refugee from the broken land America seems destined to become.

RE: The Iraq war | Why they should stay | Economist.com