Friday, November 10, 2006
A cut-and-run policy everyone can get behind
So we are down to [Rumsfeld's] supposed responsibility for the later effort to stop the 3-year plus insurgency, whose denouement is not yet known. Rumsfeld's supposed error that drew such ire was troop levels, i.e., that he did not wish to repeat a huge presence in the manner of Vietnam, but sought to skip the 1964-1971 era morass, and go directly to the 1972-5 Vietnamization strategy of training troops, providing aid, and using air power.
[...]
For the future, neither precipitous withdrawal nor a big build-up are the right solutions, the former will leave chaos, the latter will only ensure perpetual Iraqi dependency. As it is, there are too many support troops over in Iraq in compounds, who are not out with Iraqis themselves; more troops will only ensure an even bigger footprint and more USA-like enclaves.
Notwithstading this "withdrawl...will leave chaos" boilerplate, isn't what he's saying here is that we need to, well, withdraw troops because there are too damn many of them there already?
This man is divorced from any sort of reality. See, we tried to do that "lighter footprint" thing. And what did it get us? Unbridled chaos in Baghdad. Perhaps Hanson believes that "Operation Forward Together" was a huge success of American-trained Iraqi forces. It, of course, was not. It was U.S. patrols bailing out Iraqis who either could not or would not stop the killing. And Americans have paid with their lives. Even still, there are not enough troops to pacify the capital.
How Hanson can believe that any of this means "success" is beyond delusional. Or par for the course for him.
UPDATE: Even Rich "We are Winning" Lowry realizes that Hanson is out of his mind. Here he ever-so-gently points out that those marvelous Iraqi forces we've trained simply aren't up to the job. Though he doesn't say so, it's clear that he thinks Hanson's prattling on about "light footprints" is a bunch of bunk.
