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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: GROUND ZERO™ who wrote (758337)	1/29/2007 8:09:49 PM
From: pompsander	Respond to of 769670

Bill Kristol says: I've noticed the critics of the surge are already sort of saying well, OK, maybe it will work in the short term, but not in the long term. Two months ago they were denying that anything could help even in the short term. Well, no. Plenty of us who are skeptical of Plus Up have long believed that a major increase in troop numbers could have made a difference in 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007. But we haven't had such an increase, and we still don't. 17,500 more troops is a joke, as Kristol was saying before his partisanship got a hold of him. I'm also befuddled by Kristol's logic here: The threat of the surge is working. One of the most bloodthirsty leaders of one of the Shia sectarian militias seems to have fled to Iran because he is worried. And people will say oh, well, he'll come right back in. Well, fine. Let him try to come back in two or three years from now when the whole situation on the ground is different, when we've been able to tamp down the violence enough that the government's been able to get a hold, et cetera. But if the government's been able to "get a hold" in two or three years' time, why wouldn't they invite the Shiite militias back in? They could help cleanse a few Sunni areas left uncleansed in the interim. Or does Kristol believe that a Shiite government will still be relying on tens of thousands of U.S. troops at that point to achieve a genuinely national solution? If so, one can only marvel at his reserves of optimism. time.blogs.com _________________________ Kristol is famous for his poo-poohing back in 2003 of possible sectarian dangers in Iraq. He put off the warnings to some college professors and said that, in his weighty view, Iraq had never had a sectarian problem between its Shiite and Sunni populations. I wonder why they didn't, or didn't APPEAR to have such a problem. (duh). He typifies the Neocon view of the simplistic world.