Iktomie, re: "I think you give Bush some surge time, and then if things don't improve, a lot, we declare victory and leave.
The cost of the "surge" is American lives and billions of dollars, not to mention the Iraqi, (predominantly Sunni) lives that will be lost.
To use a medical analogy, if we have a cancer patient whose disease has progressed to the stage where a lesion is showing, will treating the lesion cure the patient?
That's Iraq. The cancer is an amalgamation of the cultural, tribal and religious factors that are creating strife and the headlong rush to radicalism. The symptoms include the Baghdad killings where the various tribes and religions and cultural factions butt up against each other.
When we send our troops into Baghdad to "police" the strife we aren't curing anything, we're simply treating a sore that the disease has caused.
And we're not even doing that properly. We're actually suppressing the Iraqi society's immune system by continuing to militarily support one side (the Shiites) using guns against the Sunnis when the "cure" can only derive from a force stalemate that will lead to a political settlement.
So, will sending those men and women to die and bleed, and the billions of dollars it costs us, cure the cancerous disease that afflicts Iraq, or will it simply prop up a corrupt, improperly motivated Shiite leadership that's using American men and women to destroy their Sunni opponents, while delaying the civil war and the power stalemate that is the only real hope for a political settlement?
Giving "Bush some surge time" makes political sense for both political parties, but it doesn't make sense for the soldiers who will continue to pay a horrible price for continuing a policy that is not designed to, and never will, cure the disease.
I don't know about you, but I wouldn't want to die for that. Ed |
