As I said in October of 2005, the Democrats didn't really want to win an inherit Bush's mess. Better to let the mistakes flood over us, depositing the silt that would bring us real fertility later. The same strategy is the key to "winning" Iraq.
First we pull out immediately. Omagad. Chaos. The insurgents take over. People are killed. Uhh, aren't people being killed now? Here's how this will definitely play out. First, we give the current Iraqi government all of the money we are currently spending there: $177M per day. If they can't succeed with that, they're not going to succeed. Period. Ever.
And they won't. They will go under as fast as the South Vietnamese government did. (Good: the sooner, the more money we save.) Here's the difference. Vietnam, unified, did not become a rogue state. Iraq will. Now what have we accomplished?
First, what we have done is to draw all of the insurgents out of the houses and made them a government, with an army. With weapons. In uniforms. In ranks. We know how to fight that kind of army. So once we retreat, we can conquer. Again.
And here's the cool part: this time the rest of the world will join us. Hussein wasn't scary enough. These guys will be. Yes, we, the US, will have created them. This will be the terrorist state that Bush keeps warning against. This is exactly the enemy that everyone will join us in fighting and we can have, finally, a conventional war with a real enemy.
Heck, if we get rid of Rummy, we might even keep the win. Yes, ok, ok, Rummy is the distraction from the real game. But imagine, say, John McCain as president faced with a threat that everyone could agree upon. What we need to do is to create a new Taliban state and concentrate on it before moving on to the next potential threat. Is this not a sufficiently loony thought?
Weird Views ©2006 Charles Petrie