Decius wrote:

You're focused only on some aspects of why that fit with your political perspective (such as the walling off of neighborhoods) and you're ignoring other aspects that don't fit with your political perspective (such as the tactical successes of the Army). There really are tactical successes, and you're ignoring them because tactical success conflicts with your previous convictions and not because they don't exist or because you've clearly established that there is nothing useful that can be extracted from them.

Until I see people objectively assess the situation on the ground today and conclude that there is nothing that can be salvaged from it at all I'm not going to be convinced that there is nothing that can be salvaged from it at all. I think thats only logical. I don't accept the arguement that the tactical success is useless because we didn't extract XYZ specific thing from it in this timeframe. Thats not the same analysis.

I don't deny there have been some tactical things that have worked. There are three things that have been significant there, what Petraeus has done, the segregation of Iraq, and the change of the western Sunnis to spend more time targeting their own fringe elements rather than US troops. What I am saying, and have been the entire time, is the surge was not a tactical move. The point of the surge is, and always was, to get space for an Iraqi government to step up start dealing with its own security. That is, at least in theory, the strategy.

At this point I think even that was probably a lie. What we're building is an American colony in the mid-east. The Powell Doctrine says, have a plan to get in, do what you're going to do, and a plan to get out, best known by the buzzwords "exit strategy." But as has become more clear, there is no exit strategy and never was one. One of the first things Halliburton started doing after the invasion was start building what were called "enduring bases." Iraq was to become a place from which to operate so we could project American power, immediately and forcefully, anywhere in the region.

For that prospect to work though, we would need a situation like we have in Germany or Japan or Korea, where the vast majority of the populace is in agreement with the government, that our operations there are of at least some benefit. That is not the case in Iraq. The government, such as it is, is in shambles, and the general populace wants us dead. The skilled population has fled.

So you want to build a new Iraq with what? And worse, look at the status of the other "democracies" in the region. A couple of them are such in name only (Egypt, Pakistan, Iran) and the one that is most often touted as being one, Israel, is a Jewish theocracy, and the last in the region, Turkey, is all set to turn itself into a Muslim theocracy via the ballot box. Even the base plan is wrong.

Tactics support strategies, and this administration doesn't seem to have one.

Now back to the NIE...

RE: The meaning of the NIE...