Plumer: No Viable Exit Strategy
Bradford Plumer boggles at a recent article in Time magazine (Saddam’s revenge) that includes the following:
More than a dozen current and former intelligence officers knowledgeable about Iraq spoke with TIME in recent weeks to share details about the conflict. They voiced their growing frustration with a war that they feel was not properly anticipated by the Bush Administration, a war fought with insufficient resources, a war that almost all of them now believe is not winnable militarily.
Plumer’s comments (Just perverse) actually focus on this quotation from later in the article:
Another hot debate in the intelligence community is whether to make a major change in the counterinsurgency strategy–to stop the aggressive sweeps through insurgent-riddled areas, like the recent offensive in Tall ‘Afar, and try to concentrate troops and resources with the aim of improving security and living conditions in population centers like Baghdad. “We’ve taken Samarra four times, and we’ve lost it four times,” says an intelligence officer. “We need a new strategy.”
But the Pentagon leadership is unlikely to support a strategy that concedes broad swaths of territory to the enemy. In fact, none of the intelligence officers who spoke with TIME or their ranking superiors could provide a plausible road map toward stability in Iraq. It is quite possible that the occupation of Iraq was an unwise proposition from the start, as many U.S. allies in the region warned before the invasion.
“Quite possible”? Um, no. It is now conclusively demonstrated that the occupation of Iraq was an unwise proposition from the start. The only people still arguing otherwise are the political equivalent of the Flat Earth Society, willing to dismiss any amount of contradictory evidence in order to avoid the cognitive dissonance that would accompany an admission of error.
In that, they are pretty much indistinguishable from their chosen man in the White House. And our country’s current run of incredible “bad luck” will predictably continue until they, and the awful decision-maker they elected, have been removed from the levers of power.
