Iraq’s been going down the tubes with our 140K troops in country. There was a time when doubling that number might’ve done some good; now I doubt that tripling would suffice.
Things are splintering too many ways for a political solution to be possible.
There is no Saddam-style strongman available to impose order by fear. Even Muqtada isn’t up to that job.
The duly constituted government doesn’t control much of what happens outside the Green Zone.
If the Bushies had any shame, they’d have resigned a long time ago. I hope for the day when they are bound over to The Hague.
And I pray that we, the people, never let a leader take us into war again with so few questions asked and answers demanded.
Now don’t lose hope, people - we’ve finally done something right. It’s true that we sent lots of weapons over there without recording their serial numbers, so it’s guaranteed that they’ll get stolen, but we were smart enough not to send spare parts or manuals, so they’ll only be good for a while.
:rolleyes:
I’m not familiar with that particular quote off the top of my head, but it sounds like it was probably spoken after the (arguably cooked) Gulf of Tonkin incident, at which point we were not fully comment to Viet Nam yet. We have, unfortunately, been commited to Iraq for quite some time now.
Yep… no denying it… the pooch has been screwed big time… but as even the venerable Lewis Tanner has noted, “The way I see it? We dug it, we fill it…”
My advice to the US Armed Forces and the British Armed Forces in the country is this… create 4 huge bases miles from nowhere in the Iraqi countryside. 3 for the Americans, 1 for the British. Totally withdraw from street duty and simply bunker down in the bases. Anyone comes within 5 miles without an invitation… they get zapped.
Then, just negotiate. By withdrawing from a visible presence to a non visible presence, the insurgents and militias will have no one to blame but themselves if it all goes south. But, at the same time, the US and British forces won’t have to entirely pull out their extraordinary hardware assets and inventory etc.
With hindsight, I think that’s what should have been done in the first place - other than not going in at all, that is. It would have left an awful lot of infrastructure in place. Lots less lives lost too.
What is your link? It doesn’t reference the quote posted by Airman Doors.
To clarify my position: I DON’T think we should stand in Iraq. I don’t think we should ever have been there, and I don’t think we should be there now. However, since no one who matters is saying we’ll leave anytime soon, I don’t really have a problem with sending more troops.
The other side increasing their numbers would have the expected result of more deaths for us, but increasing our numbers will not have any negative effect on our total casualties suffered - it will likely lower them. The exception to this would be a large scale war with frequent battles resulting in 100% casualties on one side - but if that’s the case, fuck it, send grandma over there too.
I remember the UN dividing a country up once before and it didn’t work out too well. Of course this may be more like dividing up Korea than dividing up Palestine. Then again the dividing up Korea things may not have worked out optimally either.
It was in the Google cache summary. But there’s plenty of other cites in response to “We will stand in Vietnam”, though, all referring to an LBJ press conference on that date in which he announced the doubling of the draft to 35,000 men per month (!). We were heavily committed, and the situation was turning completely to shit, already, of course. But more troops would fix it.
The problem with that position is that we don’t have any fresh troops to commit. At this point the only way to commit more troops is to shorten the length of time that our troops spend home and lengthening the time they spend in Iraq.
My unit just got back from a 12 month deployment and we are already scheduled to go back in August. I have also heard rumors that the Army is going to started upping active duty deployments to 18 months, and many National Guard and reserve units are already serving 18 month deployments.
So while committing more troops would be nice we really don’t have more troops to commit.