The President Makes His Pitch
Gen. Petraeus believes we have now reached the point where we can maintain our security gains with fewer American forces. He has recommended that we not replace about 2,200 Marines scheduled to leave Anbar province later this month. In addition, he says it will soon be possible to bring home an Army combat brigade, for a total force reduction of 5,700 troops by Christmas.
And he expects that by July, we will be able to reduce our troop levels in Iraq from 20 combat brigades to 15.
Gen. Petraeus also recommends that in December, we begin transitioning to the next phase of our strategy in Iraq. As terrorists are defeated, civil society takes root, and the Iraqis assume more control over their own security, our mission in Iraq will evolve. Over time, our troops will shift from leading operations, to partnering with Iraqi forces, and eventually to overwatching those forces. As this transition in our mission takes place, our troops will focus on a more limited set of tasks, including counterterrorism operations and training, equipping, and supporting Iraqi forces.
I have consulted with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, other members of my national security team, Iraqi officials, and leaders of both parties in Congress. I have benefited from their advice, and I have accepted Gen. Petraeus’s recommendations. I have directed Gen. Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker to update their joint campaign plan for Iraq, so we can adjust our military and civilian resources accordingly. I have also directed them to deliver another report to Congress in March. At that time, they will provide a fresh assessment of the situation in Iraq and of the troop levels and resources we need to meet our national security objectives.
The principle guiding my decisions on troop levels in Iraq is “return on success.” The more successful we are, the more American troops can return home. And in all we do, I will ensure that our commanders on the ground have the troops and flexibility they need to defeat the enemy.
Americans want our country to be safe and our troops to begin coming home from Iraq. Yet those of us who believe success in Iraq is essential to our security, and those who believe we should bring our troops home, have been at odds. Now, because of the measure of success we are seeing in Iraq, we can begin seeing troops come home.
The way forward I have described tonight makes it possible, for the first time in years, for people who have been on opposite sides of this difficult debate to come together.
Hmmm…don’t count on it. Democrats will not meet Bush halfway on the war – at least not the Democrats in Congress, who have made it clear they are at one with the anti-war left. How about the Democratic rank-and-file, though?
Harder to say…there has been some indication from recent polling that the average Democrat on the street is not as anti-war as the Congress is, but whether the President’s speech and the recent report from Petraeus have really moved the ball is still up in the air. Perhaps some polling done over the weekend will emerge…
Life is just so mysterious…
Why should the Democrats “meet Bush halfway?” Bush is not meeting them halfway — in fact, he isn’t making any concessions at all. By returning things to status quo ante, he is making a virtue of necessity by drawing down troops to pre-surge levels because extending the length of their tours yet again is not an option.
Let’s review. The American people voted overwhelmingly for candidates who would get us out of Iraq. George Bush’s interpretation was that the people voted for “change” and the change he offered was an escalation. Well, no. If Bush won’t even meet the American electorate halfway — in fact, he did the exact opposite of thier expressed wishes — why should the Democrats accomodate him?
There have been two strategies Bush has used, and both have failed. The first strategy was for us to stand down as Iraqi soldiers stood up. As Patreus and Crocker testified, that won’t happen for years, if at all.
The second strategy was to escalate so a decrease in violence would enable the Iraqi government to coalesce. Using the administration’s own metrics and its own timetable, this strategy has also failed. We are no closer to a stable Iraqi government than we were when the surge started, and we may be further away.
The administration touted Anbar province as an example of success. The guy who Bush met with a week ago is now dead. So much for security in Anbar province. Why should we believe anything these guys say?
It is clear for all to see that the administration is incapable of making the tough decisions necessary to end this fiasco, and it is sending more troops to die so its successors can make those decisions. Why should the Democrats — or anyone else — accomodate this?
Peter, keep in mind it’s a “small price” to pay. There’s nothing wrong with ordering 4,000 American soldiers on a suicide mission to protect people who don’t want our protection and refuse to take advantage of it.
And Mark, are slipping into insanity? The Democrats are at one with the anti-war left on which planet exactly? Please PLEASE explain to me how a party can be uniformly anti-war, in the majority in both houses of Congress, and unable to actually get the war ended. List for me all the pieces of legislation Congress has passed that include binding withdrawal timetables. Explain to me what the heck it even means to meet “halfway” on the war? Wasn’t giving the President the last four years to completely and utterly destroy the credibility of the United States enough for you?
This may just be the Michigan fan in me talking, but when all four of the horse’s legs are broken, shoot the damn thing.
The Dems in Congress do not want to end the war.
They want a political issue in 2008 so they can reclaim the presidency and increase their majorities. They bluster about the war but they will not cut off funding, the only thing they can do in the face of a veto.
They are afraid that if they actully cut off funding, they will lose in 2008 if there are Saigon like scenes. So, they rant and rave but in the end throw up their hands saying: “We can’t do anything because of the GOP”.
If President Bush is “incapable of making the tough decisions necessary to end this fiasco”, so are the Democrats.
I disagree. There are plenty of Democrats who have voted to withdraw troops and will do so again in the future: Nancy Pelosi, John Murtha, Russ Feingold, Joe Biden, Ted Kennedy, and lots more.
The fact is that even if the Democrats voted unanimously, they still lack the votes to sustain a filibuster or a veto.
“Nancy Pelosi, John Murtha, Russ Feingold, Joe Biden, Ted Kennedy, and lots more.”
Wow. That’s some list. God help you if that’s a list to which you want to attach yourself.
If they do not pass a funding bill, then the war ends. You cannot veto a non-vote, nor can you filibuster a non-vote.
Look at the last funding bill. They pass a bill with a “deadline” of sorts. The GOP does not filibuster. The President vetos and then they pass a clean bill. Pelosi and the others you name vote against it. Proves my point. They get an issue but the President gets his money.
No money, no war.
DBrooks: say what you want about Pelosi, Biden, et. al., but they were right about the war (most of them from day one) while Bush, Cheney, Powell, Rumsfeld, and the rest were dead wrong. Bush and Cheney got us into this mess with no plan to get us out besides kicking the can down the road to the next guy. They and their supporters have no right to criticize or question those who had the prescience to get it right from the start.
Bob: The Dems could probably force a withdrawal in the House but their edge in the Senate is essentially non-existent and the Senate rules are tougher. However, you may see a different result this time around than you did last time.
Peter, I think you’re incorrect. The way for the Democrats to stop the war is to simply refuse to pass an appropriations bill that includes war funding. A filibuster or veto is logically impossible in a case in which there is no bill to filibuster or veto. Bob is right when he says that they are using the war as a political football to leverage more votes for the Democratic Party. It’s shameful, but they are still the best option as far as I’m concerned. Incidentally, this is why everything Mark says about the unity of the Democrats in Congress and the anti-war left is sheer barking insanity.
I’m not questioning anyone, Peter. I’m simply stating that I wouldn’t want to be a member of a club that had individuals like that as members. Other than, perhaps, Russ Feingold, I don’t think any of the people you mention could think their way out of a wet paper bag.
Ryan: you may well be right — but you’re still left with the issue of what to do with 160,000 troops stuck in a desert. You have to get them home somehow — do you fund only enough to get them out? — and then what do you do when the appropriations bill is vetoed?
DB: I’m not hear to beat a drum for the Democratic Party, but I would prefer to be in a club with Biden, Kennedy, et. al., than Bush, Cheney, Lott, McConnell, and Boehner.
Pelosi, Feingold, and Kennedy are classic liberals. You may disagree with them, but they have a coherent and consistent philosophy.
I’m not a big Murtha fan but I give him credit for being a bona fide war hero and someone who cares deeply about the military.
Biden is a pompous windbag who is also a serious guy who seems to think deeply about things.
Pelosi and Kennedy “coherent?” I think not, my friend. That’s akin to calling Scientology a coherent philosophy. Meanwhile, back on planet Earth.
And I promise to stop with this jabberwocky.
What’s the alternative, Peter? It’s either make the president own this or don’t. Continuing to provide funding that he is going to use to send American men and women futilely to their deaths is a massive dereliction of duty.
Let me point out that I don’t think this is the only option. The Democrats can just as easily pass a bill with a withdrawal deadline on it, let Bush veto it, then go into full-court press. Has no one learned from the GOP over the last two decades how much being loud and angry can get you what you want – especially when a large majority of Americans are on your side?
What’s incoherent about Scientology? It’s dead wrong, but it’s still coherent.
Ryan: I’m hard-pressed to argue with you – I view it as a simple lack of a super-majority in the Senate, but maybe I’ve been making too many excuses for the Democratic leadership. I’m not sure that I would go so far as to say that it is dereliction of duty, but your point is well taken. If the Dems can get Republican Senators like Coleman, Collins, Warner, and others to agree to some type of restrictions with teeth, then you might see a true change in direction. Without those votes, I’m not sure how they get a bill passed. However, better to support a good bill that gets vetoed than a bad bill which passes.
Ryan, I’ll grant you that the Democratic leadership’s actions have not lived up to their rhetoric, but rhetorically, at least, they are at one with the anti-war left. There are various reasons why their actions haven’t lived up to their words, some of which you guys have pointed out in this thread – nevertheless, they will not meet the President half-way on this, because to do so would be (to their minds, at least) political suicide.
Peter, you are correct (as Andy Vance’s link also points out) that the decline in troop levels is largely tied to the end of the tours of duties of the ’surging’ troops. Bush is hardly the first president to attempt to make lemonade out of lemons, or a virtue out of necessity, now is he?…
True, dat.
Oops.
No, no, Jim Jones made something bad out of something good, that’s the exact opposite…sheesh!…
Why don’t we just take Clyburn (?) at his word that if the surge succeeds, the dems have problems?
The dems aim to have their cake and eat it: to take the anti-war’s money & votes and still defend democracy. Lucky for them, it was a GOP POTUS that got hit with 9/11, so they used the opportunity to stick it to both OBL & the GOP. They succeeded in pinning “No WMD” on Bush, when all along both left & right believed with all of their hearts that So-damn Insane had some and wanted more.
If they really wanted to end the war, they would have done what Murtha suggested and held back the money. Knowing that strategy would hurt them in the long run — can you say “single-party” govt? — we’ve got the a game of Pin-the-Ass. Where we are treated to no end of posturing and gamemanship where the objective is NOT to end the war, but to make sure that the other guy gets pinned with the donkey’s tail whenever something goes wrong.
This week, the tail is stuck on the donks, but who knows how long that’ll last?
In any case, it is the dems who are primarily playing this dangerous game and you can bet that every night they go to bed hoping that it doesn’t bite them in the a**.
Their wet dream would be that AQ could kill 200 US soldiers in one day, pinning the tail back on the GOP & even cause us to stampede out of Iraq.
Their nightmare would be that AQ could capture 200 of our kids, wherewith to defile their bodies and desecrate their corpses. We might keep our collective heads cool in that scenario, but what if they got 3,000 teachers and kids? When that happens, so help me God! We’ll see all the US Muslims rounded up for their safety and the dems would be permanently tarred & feathered.
What!?! Don’t tell me that Usama would seek out a fatwa permitting him to kill 2 million American women and children for naught. By going into Iraq, we threw him off his master plan, but that coup de grace is one that he’s dying to attain.
Back to Bush.
One can quibble about the strategy; 1) strike AQ in their nest, kill them all, call it a day’s work and go home until either Saddam strikes or better yet, Iraq & Iran go at it and in the process wipe each other out, OR 2) go for the double-whammy course that Rummy took to defeat AQ & neutralize/democratize Iraq.
In hindsight, the best laid plans went awry in that Saddam had no discoverable “WMD”, our intel wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be and the Republican Guards weren’t so tough, such that there was no one in any official capacity to sign a declaration of unconditional surrender. As for the rest of the story, we see it continue to play out. So what?
Classic example of SNAFU; how many times has the house conducted hearings? You’d think the technicians could set up microphones with their eyes closed, yet we witnessed a 15 min delay at the start of Monday’s hearings. Sometimes stuff happens unexpectedly. Anyhoo.
Had we stuck to fighting solely in Afghanistan, as demanded by General Ubama, rather than it being another “Vietnam”, it would likely have been another “Afghanistan” — a la USSR. The jihadii would have poured across the borders and fought us tooth and nail up, down & thru the mountaintops, valleys and caves. If losing 3000 on the plains of Mesopotamia is bad, wait to you see the US body count in death valley.
Logistically, commandeering the Iraqi infrastructure and facilities, that Saddam so thotfully laid in place for us, is on an order of magnitude easier than trying to project a force of 160K in Afghanistan. I seriously doubt we could sustain a force of 75K, even if we wanted to, and maintain a comparable level of safety & security for the troops as in Iraq.
Ironic that most of the Generals critical of the “Bush” plan are also the same ones that thot it more important that the soldiers be outfitted with berets and other sharp looking swag. They also considered and rejected up-armored vehicles as overkill, even as our soldiers were dying left and right in unarmored tactical vehicles from Bosnian land mines (the original IEDs). To Wesley Clark’s credit, he fought and lost to get more up-armored vehicles. Remember the 3 soldiers that Jesse Jackson “rescued”? The only reason they weren’t killed in action was because they were in a XM1114.
Heck, those Generals were even on the cusp of a multi billion dollar program in 2002 to order 100s of the brand new Crusaders (self-propelled over-the-horizon artillery best suited for fighting the Warsaw Pact) until Rummy cancelled it. That sure bruised a bunch of the proponents’ feelings. In retrospect, I can just see the MSM headlines: “Iraqi Marketplace blown up by a Crusader — Hundreds of Innocents dead”. But I digress.
Bottomline, honorable Generals can disagree on the best way to fight with what they have at hand. And most soldiers understand that what is at stake is worth more than 3700 lives + and so they fight willingly & honorably. But the politicos can’t resist Monday morning quarterbacking, especially if it’ll gain them votes in the next election. And the simple facts dictate that even Gollum, er Kucinich would stay in Iraq thru-out his 1st term if he were POTUS in 2009.
Remember Clinton’s famous exit strategy going into Bosnia back in ‘93? “We will be out by the end of the year!” Little did we know that we’d exit, not on our terms, but in order to marshal up and fight AQ in 2002. Even so, we still have a token presence in the Balkans 15 years later.
What disgusts me is that the bickering politics are out front & center for the world to see, which only gives AQ hope, and serves to discourage the “weak” (freedom loving Iraqis), not to mention the rest of the moderate Muslim street from taking a stand.
All I care about is that one way or another, we achieve success in democratizing & stabilizing Iraq, however long it takes as a counterweight to the jihadii. They started it, and yes, we’ve made mistakes going as far back as the 1950s & earlier — see Barry Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative — but gosh darn it, we’re finishing it.
Second to last paragraph, Andy. Are you saying that we should take marching orders from terrorists? Legitimate political arguments make them happy, so we should abandon them in hopes that maybe if they think we’re united against them, they’ll give up? Do you realize how ridiculous that sounds? Probably not, I’d guess, since the rest of your rambling post (liberal’s wet dream of 200 troops dead and General Ubama stick out, to me) is just as ridiculous.
Fargus, not at all.
Not that we take marching orders but that for them, they only have to wait us out until we give up and go home. That’s their own talking point. That’s the lesson they learned from us time and time again. So when they see us bickering, yeah, they’re thinking deja vu.
If the politicians must bicker, then do it behind closed doors, come to a consensus and present a united front. All the same, just because there’s a united front, doesn’t mean that one or the other has rolled over, just that the enemy is not going to be allowed to exploit any divisions. Hmmm, what were the saying? … at the water’s edge? United we…? Loose lips..?
Oh well, the well of political consensus has been thoroughly poisoned by the nutroots, just look at Lieberman and any bluedog that refuses to tow the moveon line..
As for 200 troops dead? Wasn’t the discussion at the onset of this war in Iraq that we’d likely see 10s of thousands dead, hence the Pentagon went and stock-piled a couple hundred thousand body bags? Nevertheless, Congress had a near unanimous decision to go take down Saddam regardless of the high causality estimates.
As for ridiculous, I don’t make these things up. The moving-on moonbats dwell on these type fantasies 24/7 all over the web. Mr. Babbling Streisand greets people with “Happy 9/11!!” and “it’s a day to celebrate”. Or Kos and his remark about screwing the 4 dead contractors.
Would you like more examples of nutroot wet dreams?
How about Gollum traipsing over to Syria last week and telling the Syrians that we are so-o-o wrong — translation to the Syrians: “We are infidels and as Dhimmis, we beg your tender Sharia mercies”. Perchance, he came to pay tribute in exchange for Syrian assistance in becoming POTUS. In return, he’ll do what for them? Arrange for Syria to leverage their extensive Lebanon experience by sending subject matter experts to guide his proposed Department of Peace?
As for General Ubama, he sure talks a tough game of shifting all our resources to Afghanistan, or going in and showing the Pakis how to take out OBL in their own backyard. I’m just curious as to what Generals he’s been consulting with, or did he just pull that notion out of thin air cause it sounded so-o-o Rambo? Particularly since just weeks earlier he accused troops of terrorizing innocents as SOP, or was he just channeling LT sKerry?
Gollum? Ubama?
I’d be much more willing to engage you in debate if you didn’t insist, by your very tone and language, by insulting anybody who may think anything different than you do.
Gollum? Guilty as charged, altho one could see a logical juxtaposition. I used to feel sorry for him, rather like the naifish guy that ascended the lysergic haze one time too many and has yet to come back down from the mountaintop.
That said, I’m not “insulting” him simply for thinking differently. I certainly appreciate differences of opinions as more often than not, there’s always a thing or two taken to heart. I’ve always listened to his interviews and found them thought-provoking, but there is no excuse for that trip to the dead marshes of Syria.
As bad as Pelosi was in making her hadjj, it was just another dumocrat way of politically emasculating the Bush doctrine. But for a POTUS pretender, it is absolutely mind boggling, sucking up to a terror puppetmaster. Isn’t Bashir Assad a doctor?
Name one POTUS contender that ever made such a trip to a hostile nation? I’m just trying to comprehend what’s so precious about making that trip; bookended by us catching Syria receiving nuke technology and Israel’s Osirik raid redux.
As for Ubama? According to the International Journal of Middle East Studies (IJMES), transliteration or Romanization of that vowel makes it properly “U“, or you could pronounce it Ü or you could pronounce it Ö, but it doesn’t have to be O. In any case, he was doing fine until he felt he needed to out-left Hillary and denigrate the actions of the troops. Hillary correctly called him out as naive.
I still don’t even know who you’re talking about half the time, because of your refusal to use names. It’s insulting to anybody you pretend to want to have a conversation with (though it becomes increasingly apparent every time you post that you’re more interested in yelling and playing at your version of clever than anything else).
The “U” argument is petty and betrays the lack of any type of substance beneath anything you say. I don’t doubt that you might have some interesting things to say, but as of right now, they’re all masked by a load of condescending crap.
Ok, so without the condescending crap, what do you want to have a conversation about?