As bad as things have already gotten, they can still get worse. And the trend is consistently from bad to worse to even worse than that.
Bush, who equates leaving with losing (while the rest of us equate leaving with Bush’s having to admit we’ve already lost), will keep on feeding troops into the meatgrinder as the situation spirals downward, unless 1/3 of the Republicans in Congress join the Dems in forcing a pullout. (By the time that happens, it’ll be too late to pull out by the end of '08 anyway, I’m thinking.)
They’re finding increasingly sophisticated and powerful shaped-charge munitions in Iraq. There will come a time when they are used on the walls of the Green Zone, and we will lose our American fortress in the middle of Baghdad.
I’d be quite surprised if that didn’t happen in the next two years.
We’ll have a moderately reduced presence, with ~60,000 troops there, more than half of whom will be serving as training officers for the Iraqi security forces. This will be part of a plan to withdraw completely by the end of 2010 as an effort to gather votes from an American public almost totally disgusted with the course of the occupation.
It may not be on the table for the additional troops, but we’ve upper the number of troops in training roles by quite a bit in the last year alone. When we start getting out (which we will have to do at some point), it’s likely that training will be the main function of any remaining troops.
‘How’ is that the walls of the Green Zone get blown up, and we have a Helicopter Moment.
Who? If we take on Moqtada al-Sadr, which seems to be the current plan, either his thugs or the Sunni insurgents, whoever gets there first.
After the Green Zone goes, our land-based supply lines to Kuwait get cut, and we pretty much retreat to the Permanent Bases, pending full retreat from Iraq.
Vary the ‘~60,000’ figure and essentially I think this is the most likely course of what WILL happen. My HOPE is that we are out of there by then…but the reality is that I have serious doubts that, short of some radical change, Bush et al WILL have the troops moving out.
During the presidental election Rice said there were over 100,000 full trained and equipped troops. At that rate there must be 200 or 250 thou by now. We can leave any time now.
You’re not actually comparing post-WWII occupation of Axis powers to Iraq, are you? Germany had no serious loss of life due to insurgent violence against US, UK, French and Russian occupation; Italy was never seriously occupied.
Your behavior in other threads, coupled with this one, leads me to believe that your education in history and critical thinking has been sorely lacking.
Horrible analogy. Nearly as bad as the loons on the left trying to compare Iraq to Vietnam…in fact, I’d have to say that your’s is actually worse than their’s, because there is NO comparison between our occupation of Germany, Japan or Italy with whats going on in Iraq, whereas there are some superficial similarities between Vietnam and Iraq.
The “superficial similarity” that I see is that we kept saying, “The Vietnamese must do this themselves, but they aren’t quite ready yet.”
Sound familiar?
My answer is a). Bush won’t pull out. Democrats won’t force a pullout because then the finger can be pointed at them as having thwarted what would otherwise have been a successful plan.
Like all pyramid scheme operators Bush depends on the suckers saying, “Everything would have worked out if he had just been given a little more time.”
I don’t see “C” as happening at all. The United States may decide to keep forces in Iraq or may decide to withdraw them. But I don’t think there’s any outside power that could force American troops out of the country. Heck, we’d still be in Saigon if we had decided its occupation was worth the ongoing casualties.
Pretty much, though I suppose its in how you look at the whole eviction thingy. If you look at it a certain way (say, the way the North Vietnamese did), then their efforts are GEARED to get that response. So, in a real way, they DID cause it, even though it was our own decision to bolt…because their actions were the ones that brought about that decision.
The US is particularly vulnerable to this kind of thing…which is probably why we shouldn’t get involved in these cluster fuck situations.
I think we’re essentially saying the same thing. Yes, the North Vietnamese did inflict enough casualties that the United States decided to pull out of Vietnam. But it was a decision and conceivably a different decision could have been made - the United States still had the capability to continue fighting if it had chosen to.
I see the same situation in Iraq. The United States may become unwilling to stay in Iraq because of the opposition but we won’t become unable to.
“Eviction” to me is what happened to the Germans in the Soviet Union during WWII. They never decided to leave the USSR; they were forced out against their will by the Soviets.
As sad as it makes me, I’d put my money on A. Anything else would require Bush altering his position, which seems to be the worst thing he could imagine. And I don’t see Congress cutting off funding or anything else drastic, as they will face the double attack of having previously supported the war and the charge that cutting funding “does not support the troops.” Hell, at present the thing I hear most is Bush’s push for a “surge.” How many months would it take to effect THAT chapter in this travesty?
We’ve been working hard for 4+ years to get this situation as fucked up as it is. It is going to take well over 2 more years to get it anywhere near cleaned up.
The best I would hope for would be that the '08 change in administration might signal the beginning of our voluntary departure.
Most commentators seem to think the problem isn’t how many there are, or how well they’re trained, but who they’re loyal to. If few of those security forces believe in the official government, and they’re mostly members of one militia or another, then building up the security forces just adds to the problem.
My bad - by putting the alternatives in the thread title, I was limited by the max number of characters there. So I really should have clarified the choices in the OP.
But you raise an interesting issue. That would be an eviction of sorts, assuming we’d go if we were told to go. (Once upon a time, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell said we would leave if asked.) The question is, would Bush do so now?
If we lose the Green Zone, and we lose control of the supply lines to Kuwait, then it boils down to logistics: how large a force can we resupply by air? I don’t know the answer, but I’m sure it’s a heck of a lot smaller than the force we’ve got in there now.
As it is, a good chunk of our forces in Iraq are there to simply maintain the Permanent Bases. If we lose the land-based supply lines, we might find ourselves limited in scope to air operations, and fairly small ground operations operating from and returning to the PBs that have little effect on the overall situation in Iraq.
I think we lose the supply lines if we get either Sadr or Hakim seriously pissed at us. And it looks like we’ve picked Muqtada.