Thursday, January 11, 2007

The Urge to Surge   [John Derbyshire]

Sorry, but it struck me as a snow job, from an administration that—pretty much like the rest of us—has no clue where to go from here.

The central and most glaring contradiction is the implied threat to walk away... Yoked to the ringing declaration that, of course, we can't walk away.  We seem to be saying to the Maliki govt.:  "Hey, you guys better step up to your responsibilites, or else we're outa here."  This, a few sentences after saying that we can't leave the place without a victory.  So-o-o-o:

—-We can't leave Iraq without a victory.

—-Unless Maliki & Co. get their act together, we can't achieve victory.

—-If Maliki & Co. don't get their act together, we'll leave.

It's been a while since I studied classical logic, but it seems to me that this syllogism leaks like a sieve.

Glaring through the president's speech is the awful fact that we are short on sticks.  We're short on carrots, too; but this is the Middle East, and it's sticks that count.

Other points:

The president: "America will hold the Iraqi government to the benchmarks it has announced."  Or else... what?  (Same as previous point, I guess.  But what's the answer?)

The President:  "And there were too many restrictions on the troops we did have."  May we know which restrictions, precisely, our commanders (including the Commander-in-Chief) will now lift?

The President:  "Iran is providing material support for attacks on American troops. We will disrupt the attacks on our forces. We will interrupt the flow of support from Iran and Syria."  We haven't been doing this?  We haven't been doing this?  How many of the the 21,500 troops of the "surge" will be assigned to these operations?  Leaving how many for Baghdad and Anbar?  Shall we have a "hot pursuit" policy?

And, returning to the issue of sticks:  What, exactly, do Iran and Syria have to fear from us, whatever they do?

01/11 09:01 AMShare