Hi all; Two years of war and even the morons want out.
Conservatives and exiles desert war campaign
Financial Times, October 11, 2005
Even among the strongest advocates in Washington of the war in Iraq there is a sense of alarm these days, with harsh criticism directed particularly at the draft constitution, which they see as a betrayal of principles and a recipe for disintegration of the Iraqi state.
Expressions of concern among conservatives and former Iraqi exiles, seen also in the rising disillusionment of the American public, reflect a widening gap with the Bush administration and its claims of “incredible political progress” in Iraq.
Over the past week, two of Washington's most influential conservative think-tanks, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the Heritage Foundation, held conferences on Iraq where the mood among speakers, including Iraqi officials, was decidedly sombre.
Kanan Makiya, an outspoken proponent of the war who is documenting the horrors of the Saddam regime in his Iraq Memory Foundation, opened the AEI meeting by admitting to many “dashed dreams”.
He said he and other opposition figures had seriously underestimated the powers of ethnic and sectarian self-interest, as well as the survivability of the “constantly morphing and flexible” Ba'ath party. He also blamed the Bush administration for poor planning and committing too few troops.
...
Michael Eisenstadt of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a pro-war think-tank, said insurgents were mounting about 90 attacks a day, compared to 50 to 70 a year ago. He expressed concern that if the constitution is approved insurgents will be able to mobilise more support from Sunnis who feel the system is stacked against them.
Speaking later to the FT, Mr Eisenstadt said it would take years to defeat such an insurgency but there were indications that the Bush administration would start to pull out troops in 2006 for its own political and electoral reasons.
“I don't know if it is winnable, but we haven't lost it yet,” Mr Eisenstadt concluded. The original goals, he said, were out of reach but “something acceptable” was still possible.
...
news.ft.com
The fact is that the war is not winnable and never was. To believe in a fairyland hope that it was winnable was to consign several thousand US soldiers to an early grave in a doomed effort that resulted in a larger and healthier Al Qaeda than ever before.
You can go on and on about how this war was moral based on UN resolutions, or necessity or whatever you want, but the fact is that we are two years on and we have so little control of the territory that we're blowing up bridges to keep the enemy from using them. Those are bridges that in the early part of the war we saw as assets.
You can go on and on about how we need this war in order to save Iraq from whatever, but the fact is that the mess in the country is far worse now than it ever was before we got there.
You can go on and on about how victory is right around the corner, (what's the latest, that the number 3 man in Al Qaeda has been taken?) but the fact is that similar things have been told essentially constantly for 2 years and it doesn't fool anyone.
-- Carl |
