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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neocon who wrote (153165)	12/2/2004 11:28:00 AM
From: steve dietrich	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Makes you wonder how many reinforcements will flow across the Iraq border for the insurgents.

To: Neocon who wrote (153165)	12/2/2004 7:08:52 PM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Hi Neocon; Re: "The number of American troops will pass from 138,000 to 150,000 between the end of December and the beginning of January." Interesting. So Bush is going to have most of the troops withdrawn from Iraq (with a "victory") by the end of his term? Maybe his plan is to bump up the total from his first term, so any reductions later on will look better. Compare: Neocon, November 29, 2004 Except, by that time, the primary security burden will have shifted to the Iraqis, we will be largely disengaged, and will have substantial troop withdrawals, with only a residual force based near Baghdad for as a forward deployment post. #reply-20808740 Now we've already been training Iraqis to secure themselves for better than a year. One would expect that there would have been some results from all this effort, and the thousand troops we lost. But instead, we have to increase our troops in Iraq. What's going on here? Is the resistance increasing? Have our allies abandoned us? -- Carl P.S. I picked up Kagan's fascinating history of the Peloponnesian war, and am about 1/3 done. It is a truly well written book, and I highly recommend it. Here's the book review at Foreign Affairs, which includes a link to buy it from Barnes and Noble: Kagan's masterful four-volume history of the Peloponnesian War, the titanic clash between the Athenians and the Spartans in the last decades of the fifth century BC, remains the definitive work on the subject. Kagan here provides a condensed version for a popular readership, telling the story as well as it can be told. Still, given the regular use of Thucydides' original chronicle of the war in contemporary commentary, it is sad that the contraction means the loss of Kagan's own comparisons with later periods, one of the more unique features of his earlier four-volume work. foreignaffairs.org The Peloponnesian war is a great example of a sea power (like the US) getting involved in a debilitating land war in an unimportant far off land, and then running out of money. Sea powers need to play to their natural strengths.