Which is, of course, pretty much SOP for them. Let's just trash the guy because what he is apparently going to say doesn't fit our political agenda. But remember: don't ever question their Patriotism Disgraceful. http://washingtontimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070906/NATION/109060064/1001
Wait, wait, wait, wait. I thought I was told to listen to the generals? Did the goal posts move again?
http://www.allamericanpatriots.com/...sh_hype_anbar_doesnt_vindicate_surge_strategy 1) Isn't that the point 2) Nice to completely discredit the work of the military, Chuck.
If the White House really wanted to avoid the "smears" coming from the left, then perhaps they shouldn't have drafted the "Patraeus" report. Seriously, as soon as I learned that the White House--and not the general or his crew--was going to draft the report, it lost all credibility in my eyes. You can argue that I'm not being fair, but I'm only exercising the lessons I've learned over the past seven years.
Dude, the law required that the president create the report. There was no option for the General to draft it written into the legislation.
I don’t think any of us expected you to view this report with anything but contempt. Now if it says that the surge is not working, I’m sure you’ll spin the other way.
Didn't realize that about the mandate for the report. My bad. And, on the basis of the number of civilian and US casualties and the poor performance on benchmarks, it's safe to assert that the surge is not working.
Problem is that these are pass/fail benchmarks which don't even begin to tell the whole story. Let's see how we are progressing and where we need help. What would you consider working? Hitting every benchmark? If that was the case, every soldier would be on their way home due to our overwhelming success. This thing is gonna take time, specifically since we are starting from scratch since Gen Patreus has taken over.
"Working," for me, would be any indication of significant improvement at all. Really, not much has changed in the past few years. Soldiers die, the police force has become an ethnic militia, Sunnis kill Shia, and Shia kill Sunnis. Every now and then, for the hell of it, somebody blows up 500 Kurds. We're kidding ourselves if we think that we can solve a 1300-year-old conflict in a few years. Either we take Joe Biden's advice and partition the country or we instigate a draft and really pacify the place. At the very least, we need to try to force Iraq to abandon ethnicity-based regions at all. Or we come home and start preparing our mea culpas for the world. One thing I'm certain I'll never see is any indication of humility on the part of the people who banged the drums for this war, and that includes people on this forum.
You seriously see no indication of signifigant improvment? Wow. I sure have. And what good does humility do in this situation?
Some tiny signs of small improvement in a few areas with regard to certain insurgent groups. Still no legislation, and most importantly, no indication at all that the civil war--let's call it what it is here--is going to end anytime soon. The police force is a total mess. Civilian casualties haven't changed, and more US soldiers are dying per month than were in comparable months in 2005 and 2006. Al Qaeda in Iraq has been punched around pretty badly lately, but the notion that Al Qaeda in Iraq is among the biggest worries in the war is an American invention. A little over a week ago, 500 people were killed in the second most deadly terrorist attack in history--second only to September 11th. It happened in a region that was supposed to be "safe." That kind of puts a damper on one's enthusiasm for the surge. Doesn't matter whether it does good. When you're as wrong as the hawks were about the war, humility is the only appropriate response.
I don't understand how you, or any other human for that matter, can take Biden seriously. There is a reason he's going to be an "also ran" in the Democrat campaign for president; nobody takes him seriously and his knowledge of Iraq, and the ongoing war therein, is limited to what his ego tells him, not what is actually happening in Iraq or what Americans are doing in said war. Partitioning the country? Can't be done. We can't even guard our own southern border; imagine trying to guard a border in another nation at war? Besides partitioning a nation suggests that coalition troops - or anyone in military control - are qualified to divide a local populace... Nevermind... trying to logically understand anything that Joe Biden says is a fools errand; just accept that Joe is an idiot and it all makes sense.
Aaargh! The Bush lovers call it a war, and the Bush haters call it a civil war. It's not a war. It's futile nation-building, by Uncle Sam, the eternal chump.