The White House Scales Back Talk of Iraq Progress
And:
So: little military progress, and no reason to expect any political progress anyway.
So gather up your jackets, and move it to the exits…
Yeah, but the one thing I can’t figure out is why September?
Unless they’re going to release the data on September 11th in an attempt to have it swamped by 9/11 flagellation, what’s special about September?
-Joe
Apparently the Pentagon is scheduled to do a “comprehensive review” or some such in September. That’s the straight answer.
David Kurtz, who posts at TalkingPointsMemo on weekends to give Josh Marshall a breather, recalled that in December, they’d published this email from a reader:
Kurtz: “We’re right on schedule.”
Rebuilt Iraq Projects Found Crumbling
I’m certain that the projects in areas which are too dangerous to enter are all working perfectly. 
Squink, that’s an excellent topic for its own thread, no? I’m tempted to run with it myself, but I don’t want to steal your thunder.
Feel free to slither round the after-bulge of the tranship, and dig in your claws.
Looks like we’re back to artillery barrages against Baghdad neighborhoods, which Petraeus says doesn’t work. Or he used to say that, anyway.
And the current toll from today’s suicide bombing in Karbala is 68 dead, 178 injured. Good thing we’re excluding those from the stats, or we’d never realize things in Iraq are getting better.
There was just a big purge, apparently originating in Maliki’s office, of army and police officers, “some of whom had apparently worked too aggressively to combat violent Shiite militias.”
The utter clusterfuck nature of all this and the monumental idiocy of those doing it, as well as their supporters on this board, would be funny if it weren’t for the fact that they’re killing thousands of people.
Maybe it’s funny in a sort of insane, laughter-of-the-damned way.
Well, geez, who’d’a thunk it?
After all, when Bush announced the surge back in January, he said:
Guess Maliki wasn’t quite being straight with Bush. And so, as Bush said, “If the Iraqi government does not follow through on its promises, it will lose the support of the American people,” and “America’s commitment is not open-ended.” So I wonder what Bush’s response to this will be? :rolleyes:
Dunno about Bush yet, but what Condi says is this:
So if the Iraqi government doesn’t even try to meet the benchmarks, the Bush Administration isn’t going to assign any consequences.
So I guess what Bush means is that, quite specifically, the American people will stop supporting the war, and will demand action through their elected representatives, and that will effect the non-open-endedness of America’s support for Maliki’s government.
Except that Bush is going to veto Congress’ efforts in that direction.
I guess that our support for the Iraqi government is open-ended after all.
Nah, it’s “funny” in a “It’s not me because I’m safely here in the UK/Canada” kind of way.
-Joe
The surge is a delaying tactic to put the problem in the lap of the next administration. What they will do is fraught with danger. How can they simply pull out and let the mess continue. Yet staying will involve us in the mess. We have spent billions on bases and an embassy, could we abandon them?
Nothing we have done is real. The building we did is crumbling . The people want us out. But so much money has gone into the military industrial corporations ,that they will politically force us to stay. What a mess. I am ashamed of what we have become.
Me too. 
The converse is also true. Given that the future has not yet taken place, there is no evidence that pulling out right now WILL NOT stretch out the chaos and death either. At best, all that you (or I) can do is extrapolate existing dots into the future, but nobody can definitely state what WILL happen. That’s the problem with accusing someone else’s arguement of not being a fact in a debate. You better make sure that YOUR rebuttal is a fact itself, which in this particular debate, it isn’t. Your rebuttal is speculation too.
So what am I getting at? Well, it’s this… ad hominem logic comes in more forms than just attacking someone on a personal level. The goal of an ad hominem is to somehow prove someone else’s claim is untrue by introducing irrelevant issues not pertinent to the discussion. But ultimately it’s a logical fallacy. And that’s what you did here. You tried to prove the original claim was untrue by implying that your converse assertion IS true - but your counter claim is also speculation. Hence, the score is still nil-nil.
Consider this quote as another example. This again, is a logical fallacy on your part which again is defined as an ad hominem digression. The title of this debate is NOT “Is Iraq better off than it was under Saddam?” Introducing an emotional digression which “seemingly” is related (but ultimately isn’t) does NOT prove the original claims are untrue. It merely reflects a poor debating capacity. Noting that things were more peaceful under Saddam (which is true) does NOT mean that your later claim that “it’s going to keep worse for a long time” is ALSO true. That’s just speculation wrapped up in ad hominem logical fallacy. In my opinion, it’s highly likely that an ABSCENCE of American soldiers will expedite a mini Rawanda secnario, but I would dare not pass that off as fact.
Hence, my answer to the “true” question in this debate is this… statistically, the evidence would indicate that Iraq is averaging the worst rate of death and carnage than at anytime in the past 4 years - which is incredibly sad, considering that Iraq had never known a car bombing in it’s history prior to 2003. The evidence would indicate that in Baghdad specifically, the quality of life amongst civilians is the lowest it has been in the past 4 years, which also means it’s the lowest it’s been since before 1970. Iraq once had a very wealthy middle class (in regional relative terms). My personal position on how to solve that problem has been outlined elsewhere, but that’s not what this thread asked. Right now, as at today’s date, I haven’t seen any conclusive evidence that the curves are levelling out, let alone getting better.
Of course there is. The fact that we created this situation; the fact that it’s only getting worse with us there. Without removing the cause, how can things ever get better ? For any solution to the mess in Iraq, Step 1 is get America out. Before healing can begin, you have to stop the stabbing.
Sorry, no. First, I never said that my predictions are facts; normally, the assumption when one speaks of future events is that you are not speaking of facts. Ryan_Liam’s argument WAS that staying is better for the Iraqis is a fact. Not an opinion, not a prediction, not a projection; such an obvious “fact” that he doesn’t know “why can’t people deal with” it.
What do you think should be done, honestly? I find it very easy to support a withdrawal because then Iraq would not be the problem of the United States anymore. But I’m not sure how any American could sleep at night with that decision. For better or worse, we toppled Saddam Hussein’s government. Hussein was a strongman who kept racial and religious strife in the country controlled via absolute dictatorship. Removing him was not a bad thing, but removing him also incidentally destroyed the stability he provided. The United States went into this war with its eyes open, it was openly stated from the beginning we planned to remove Saddam which means everyone everywhere should have been aware that meant we were going to be responsible for establishing the post-Saddam government.
We knew what we were doing, and major errors were made in doing it. A lot of the blame can be placed on the military leadership and I do not just mean the military leadership who actually lead the invasion or planned the invasion. I mean the military leadership dating back to 1990 or so, and the civilian leadership that has continued to fund the development of weapons only useful in huge conventional wars (like massive mobile artillery, for example.) We’ve continually funded stuff to equip the military to fight the next World War II, dating all the way back to well, World War II.
Fighter planes, artillery, strategic bombers, et cetera are all important; and we should have them in case we ever do fight a conventional war again. But let’s be honest, the last two major wars (the current one and the Vietnam war) were not conventional wars by and large. While Vietnam had some significant “conventional” battles, the general erosion of support for said war was by and large the result of unconventional attacks that cause high casualties.
I’m not saying we need to take away entirely funding and training towards fighting traditional wars, but we need people in the upper echelons of military leadership and people in the civilian leadership who are committed to structuring the military around counter-insurgency. It’s easy, incredibly easy, to say situations are unwinnable. I don’t like it when people says a situation is unwinnable because then it’s easy to say “well, whoever got us involved was stupid and everyone else is blameless.” That’s the easy way out and helps no one. The truth of the matter is, few situations are truly unwinnable from the beginning, they have to be mismanaged at many different stages to reach a point where you could even begin to say a situation is unwinnable.
One of the best ways to fight an insurgency is to provide security to the population. You do that by actually being around the population and providing security. We’re doing that, to a degree, in Iraq. But the focus is still far too heavily on us being deployed in entrenched bases and only going out into the public for sorties. It’s arguable as to whether we’re truly fighting an insurgency aimed at removing us any more. I think we’re probably more aptly termed to be trying to keep the peace between various factions. This also is something we’re going to be doing a lot, and have done a lot, throughout the 1990s. And just like dealing with an insurgency, helping to stop two or more sides from fighting is based on large part in the ability to project security to the population.
Back to RickJay’s post, I continue to support the leadership because the alternative is a withdrawal, which I view as immoral. Right or wrong, we went into Iraq, and the majority of the United States supported that decision. Even if we accept all the Democratic propaganda about how ill-considered this action was, I do not see how that absolves us of our greater responsibility to the Iraqi people. Withdrawal will not end the war, it will just remove us from it. We do not have the power to end the war by withdrawing, something the Democrats conveniently don’t mention. Their focus is on “bringing our boys home” which is all well and good, but the United States has a responsibility to Iraq. Maybe us being there makes things worse than it would be if we withdrew, but somehow I doubt that. Despite the fact Iraqis are being killed by Americans–both insurgents and civilians killed collaterally, does not necessarily equate to saying less death would be going on if we left. In fact it could easily lead to more death. In any case, I think because of our responsibility to the Iraqi people a unilateral withdrawal is totally unacceptable morally, the only acceptable withdrawal is one that is requested by the Iraqi government.
Until that happens we have a responsibility to continually refine our strategies to try and be most effective there. Which is why I don’t have a problem with a General doing something that in the past they said was ineffective. Generals are not politicians, they have to make decisions on shorter timetables and with less collaboration, and Generals have to be ready to experiment, continuously. A politician is afraid of “going back on their word” because it may make them look bad in the press. A General cannot be afraid of that, if a General mistakenly said a strategy was ineffective but later has reason to think it would be effective, the General has a responsibility to employ that strategy.
The Iraqi people don’t want us there and it’s their call. I’ll sleep just fine.
Well we DO know what is happening NOW and none of it is indicative of any positive effect the American occupation might be having in Iraq. Quite the opposite actually:
Despair stalks Baghdad as plan falters
– highlights mine.
And you also have this:
Poll: Iraqis pessimistic about war’s outcome
- again, highlights mine.
Thus:
1-Things have only gotten progressively worse since the start of the occupation. Thus there’s no logical reason to think that prolonging said occupation is going to magically reverse that trend.
2-It has been made abundantly clear by the Iraqis themselves that you are NOT wanted there.
Now, those are FACTS and anything else posted by the remnants of the pro-war crowd is sheer delusion.
Martin, I sympathize with your position, I held to the “broke it - must fix it” position for some time. There is much to be said for responsibility for our actions.
But at a certain point it becomes nothing more than penance, nothing more than suffering for the sake of suffering. Even if our will is benign and pure, we cannot enforce that will. We don’t have the power to force a peaceful resolution.
Perhaps - *perhaps! * - if we had made the right moves some years back, we might have been able to shepherd the Iraqi people towards an acceptable state of mutual comity and respect. Be that as it may, that time is long past, we cannot stuff the Cheney back into the bottle. We cannot cut their losses, we can only cut ours.
Out now.