Hi Michael D. Cummings; Re: "Carl, there is an exit strategy in Iraq. What do you want a precise date?"
The first "exit plan" in Iraq was to leave in July 2003, after the wholesome Iraqi people joyfully overfed our soldiers with homebaked apple pie and bored them with ticker-tape parades.
The next "exit plan" in Iraq was to kill or capture the "playing cards", and thereby eliminate the rebellion by eliminating its leaders. The increase in fighting despite the continuing capture of Baathists put the lie to that exit plan.
The most recent "exit plan" in Iraq was to get the rest of the world to replace our troops with theirs. That one failed when no one sent any significant number of troops. Consequently the administration is now talking about calling up more reserves.
Only God knows what the present "exit plan" in Iraq is. President Bush had a chance to tell us about it, but all he said was that we "must win", and a few other obvious platitudes.
The problem with Iraq is that it is a "police action", and police actions typically do not end, unless you put in a certain number of police. For a country the size of Iraq, the number of police required is around 500,000 and Bush can't possibly collect that many soldiers.
So in terms of militarily viable "exit plans", there is none for Iraq. Hey, if there was a plan for capturing territory, and we were capturing territory, and holding it, and so increaing the territory we had captured, I would consider that an "exit plan" (i.e. victory).
But the fight in Iraq is a police action, which are, at their heart, a "battle for hearts and minds", which is essentially an impossible task for foreign soldiers. This is in distinction to Korea, where we were not fighting for hearts and minds, but instead were fighting soldiers. In Iraq and Vietnam we are fighting civilians.
Iraq is in distinction to Afghanistan where it is the Afghans who are doing the fighting. We're only there to assist. But even that isn't looking so good right now, and that is because of the fact that we crapped on our anti-terror program by going into Iraq.
Re: "We're still in Germany, was that a big mistake?"
While there have been a few incidents in Germany where our soldiers were targeted, the number of incidents, compared to the number of years we've been in Germany, and the number of soldiers we have in Germany, are sufficiently small that there is no reason for us to have an exit plan for Germany.
You only need an exit plan when your troops are in places that are so dangerous that your troops regularly kill innocent civilians accidentally. I haven't heard about us shooting up dozens of German police, for example.
You don't need an exit plan for the places where you are wanted. You don't need an exit plan for places where you're having trouble, but the trouble is decreasing with time.
You only need exit plans for stuff you're going to do in the future, so that you can get out if it turns out that it's going to be a quagmire. You only need exit plans for occupations that turn out to be like Vietnam.
The stuff that is going on in Iraq makes it more difficult to get people to sign up for the Reserves. Eventually, if you keep up the stuff in Iraq long enough, you have to either accept horrendous casualties (as the other side organizes a truly active guerilla resistance, something we have not yet seen), or you have to decide to "win" the war by drafting everyone's kids and sending them to kill and die.
But if the whole purpose of the endeavor was to find WMDs that were figments of the fevered imagination of the administration, it becomes impossible to get the American public to sign their kids away.
-- Carl |
