Surge In A Bottle
Ed, Rick, if I may interject….?
What the al-Maliki government does or does not do is largely irrelevant. It’s what OUR government is doing that matters. And this arbitrary, artificial September deadline is the catalyst for pretty much everything bad that is happening in Iraq right now. al Qaeda and the other Islamist irregulars Iran is directing are simply timing their “pushback” to maximize the likelihood of Congress cutting off war funding and forcing a withdrawal.
The question is not whether the “Surge” can work, but rather can it work fast enough, and sufficiently spectacularly to burn through the anti-war media bias. The problem is, you can’t fight a war on a public relations timetable. As a matter of fact, you can’t fight a war on any public relations template - not in this day and age - if you intend to win.
May as well call the “Surge” the “Last Gasp”. Or, to join in the Titanic metaphor, “going down for the third time”. Even if it does succeed in the allotted time on the ground, it’ll never be reported that way.
June 18th, 2007 at 9:09 pm
Well said. These is the web we’ve spread for ourselves. I fear that regardless of what happens in Iraq, we end up concocting a justification for leaving that heap of a country before we burn up everything we’ve got trying to get them to stand on their own.