...kicking around the "fearful" President's dilemma...
One of the most basic tenants of any martial art is to never act out of anger or fear...perhaps if Shrub had studied Tai Kwan Do?
It should be worth the effort shouldn't it?
I most certainly agree with you here...unfortunately, the situation in Iraq reminds me of the old-school football coach who eschewed the forward pass, saying that, when thrown, only three things could happen and two were bad.
I found this on Best of the Blogs and feel that it summarizes the scenarios fairly well:
"First, there is the best case scenario. Sometime between six months to five years from now, happy Iraqis will go to the polls and chose a new leader in an absolutely free election. Living conditions will improve, a reasonable amount of stability will return. But, we’re still going to need to keep a force of something like 150,000 troops there for the next five years minimum—many of them still engaged in sporadic combat. The number of American dead will climb steadily but if we’re really, really lucky, the evildoers will not be able to land a big hit, like, say, a barracks of Marines. The Iraq oil will eventually start flowing and the whole enterprise will wind up costing the American taxpayer $10 billion to $20 billion a year for maybe a decade until we can leave with our dignity intact.
The second possibility is the Afghanistan scenario or, as some like to call it, the Rumsfeld special. We stabilize Baghdad and a few other cities, more or less, and don’t even try to impose order on the rest of the country; Paul Bremer runs the country for six months to a year while the administration passes out the rebuilding contracts and oil concessions to its cronies and big campaign contributors; we rig some kind of “council” so that our favorite Shiite is named the Karzai of Iraq, and we announce that Iraq is free and pull out, leaving behind a security force to protect the new leader. The American people will soon lose interest and move on to something else. This is by far the most likely exit strategy, based on what we know about how ShrubCo operates.
The last, and scariest, option is the Gaza/Viet Nam quagmire scenario. In this one, the administration decides it will lose too much face by abandoning our new adoptee and decides to tough it out until order is imposed on the entire country and the seeds of the democratic process have been firmly planted. Instead of a brief and peaceful occupation, there are constant suicide bombings, shootouts at checkpoints, assassination attempts, guerilla insurgency, fierce independence movements from the Kurds, unpleasantness with the Turks, efforts by the Sunnis to re-grab power, and the constant threat of al Qai’da and other terrorist groups slipping back and forth from Iran and Syria to strike at American troops. Costs in lives will run into the thousands and money will run to hundreds of billions of dollars. It will be only a matter of time until we start assassinating “known terrorists,” razing their families’ homes with bulldozers, and hot pursuing insurgents into neighboring countries."
bestoftheblogs.com |
