Re: OT - NY Times nails it


Swillabrew wrote:
> Editorial
>
> Plan: We Win
>
> We've seen it before: an embattled president so swathed in his inner circle
> that he completely loses touch with the public and wanders around among
> small knots of people who agree with him. There was Lyndon Johnson in the
> 1960's, Richard Nixon in the 1970's, and George H. W. Bush in the 1990's.
> Now it's his son's turn.
> It has been obvious for months that Americans don't believe the war is going
> just fine, and they needed to hear that President Bush gets that. They
> wanted to see that he had learned from his mistakes and adjusted his course,
> and that he had a measurable and realistic plan for making Iraq safe enough
> to withdraw United States troops. Americans didn't need to be convinced of
> Mr. Bush's commitment to his idealized version of the war. They needed to be
> reassured that he recognized the reality of the war.
> Instead, Mr. Bush traveled 32 miles from the White House to the Naval
> Academy and spoke to yet another of the well-behaved, uniformed audiences
> that have screened him from the rest of America lately. If you do not happen
> to be a midshipman, you'd have to have been watching cable news at
> midmorning on a weekday to catch him.
> The address was accompanied by a voluminous handout entitled "National
> Strategy for Victory in Iraq," which the White House grandly calls the newly
> declassified version of the plan that has been driving the war. If there was
> something secret about that plan, we can't figure out what it was. The
> document, and Mr. Bush's speech, were almost entirely a rehash of the same
> tired argument that everything's going just fine. Mr. Bush also offered the
> usual false choice between sticking to his policy and beating a hasty and
> cowardly retreat.
> On the critical question of the progress of the Iraqi military, the
> president was particularly optimistic, and misleading. He said, for
> instance, that Iraqi security forces control major areas, including the
> northern and southern provinces and cities like Najaf. That's true if you
> believe a nation can be built out of a change of clothing: these forces are
> based on party and sectarian militias that have controlled many of these
> same areas since the fall of Saddam Hussein but now wear Iraqi Army
> uniforms. In other regions, the most powerful Iraqi security forces are
> rogue militias that refuse to disarm and have on occasion turned their guns
> against American troops, like Moktada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army.
> Mr. Bush's vision of the next big step is equally troubling: training Iraqi
> forces well enough to free American forces for more of the bloody and
> ineffective search-and-destroy sweeps that accomplish little beyond
> alienating the populace.
> What Americans wanted to hear was a genuine counterinsurgency plan, perhaps
> like one proposed by Andrew F. Krepinevich Jr., a leading writer on military
> strategy: find the most secure areas with capable Iraqi forces. Embed
> American trainers with those forces and make the region safe enough to spend
> money on reconstruction, thus making friends and draining the insurgency.
> Then slowly expand those zones and withdraw American forces.
> Americans have been clamoring for believable goals in Iraq, but Mr. Bush
> stuck to his notion of staying until "total victory." His strategy document
> defines that as an Iraq that "has defeated the terrorists and neutralized
> the insurgency"; is "peaceful, united, stable, democratic and secure"; and
> is a partner in the war on terror, an integral part of the international
> community, and "an engine for regional economic growth and proving the
> fruits of democratic governance to the region."
> That may be the most grandiose set of ambitions for the region since the
> vision of Nebuchadnezzar's son Belshazzar, who saw the hand writing on the
> wall. Mr. Bush hates comparisons between Vietnam and Iraq. But after
> watching the president, we couldn't resist reading Richard Nixon's 1969
> Vietnamization speech. Substitute the Iraqi constitutional process for the
> Paris peace talks, and Mr. Bush's ideas about the Iraqi Army are not much
> different from Nixon's plans - except Nixon admitted the war was going very
> badly (which was easier for him to do because he didn't start it), and he
> was very clear about the risks and huge sacrifices ahead.
> A president who seems less in touch with reality than Richard Nixon needs to
> get out more.
>

Too bad the NYT was such a bimbo cheerleader for the march TO war.

> Go Blazers !

.

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