McCain word fencing
May 27th, 2008, 8:09 am · 1 Comment · posted by jhogg
“…As long as there is a reasonable prospect for succeeding in this war then we must not choose to lose it.”
But once prospects become unreasonable then, by all means, lose away.
These bits of optimism are cheery. William Lind once recounted the anecdote of a junior officer in the Wehrmacht who said in 1945 that Berlin was an ideal place for his office, as he would soon be able to take a street car between the two fronts.
June 1st, 2008 at 10:07 am
But the main trouble is, is there? How can anyone tell?
We know the tactical situation, sure. General Dave Petreaus has roughly six more months to wipe out the pockets of criminals and outsiders that have taken over areas that had been abandoned under the Rumsfeld doctrine of holing up in forts and pushing the propaganda that the war was progressing as planned, until it became obvious that this was a lie. After that, it’s a brand new ball game.
At this point in time, the neocons in their infinite wisdom have decided to pay off the three main factions in the Iraqi civil war, and push the domestic propaganda in the USA that we are now winning, pointing to decreased violence and attributing it General Dave’s and his troops
magnificent work, instead of the hard reality of the situation.
It gets them to the end of their term in office, and when the payments stop (and they will stop, paying off three armies to stand down and rest and refit is completely unstainable) and the violence restarts their propaganda machine will be able to point as to how well they had the situation in hand and just how and why the opposition party has failed.
On the other hand, they could stop the payments themselves and when the violence begins attempt to blame it on Iran, in yet another attempt to crank up the war which will be so very lucrative to the Military Industrial Complex and the oil cartels but so very bad for the nation.
But I have always held that the solution to Iraq, whatever it is going to be, only begins when Cheney and Bush and the rest of the neocons
are removed from office. Only then will the Americans be able to get a read on the situation without a bunch of lying politicians attempting to
play public relations games. And those lying politicians include a whole lot of high ranking officers in the military, for the very thing that got many of the generals into their positions is their political leanings, not their military competence.
It’s a mess, but there is a light at the end of the tunnel; and that light is that Dick Cheney, the man who was most responsible for the failure in Iraq and the biggest impediment to the political solutions in both Iraq and Afghanistan will finally be out of the decision making process.
It has been said that Dick Cheney has been suffering from vascular
dementia, that not enough oxygen has been getting through to his brain and that he is operating like a stroke victim. His decision making process and public speaking engagements seem to bear this out. This has been the primary source of the problem of the American military in Iraq and Afghanistan, what with our regular president being
a simpleton and the defacto president suffering from dementia. This will change in 233 days, and that can only be a change for the better.