Are we on course or trapped in a swamp?

[mourningdove92]

Are we on course or trapped in a swamp?

BY JOSEPH L. GALLOWAY
[e-mail]

A truly horrible summer that seemed unending finally is fading away, and the cold winds of reality are blowing down the collars of a president and the key players in his administration. Those winds could foretell an even more terrible winter ahead.

The word in Washington and in the halls of the Pentagon is that Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld is seriously considering handing in his resignation sometime this month.

The generals who run the war in Iraq -- Central Command boss Gen. John Abizaid and ground commander Gen. George Casey -- came to town last week and let slip the awful truth about our efforts to stand up an Iraqi army and security force.

Although the Americans have spent a small fortune training and equipping more than 200,000 Iraqi soldiers and militia and police, the generals concede that only one battalion of perhaps 700 troops actually is capable of operating against the home-grown insurgents and the foreign jihad terrorists.

After two years only one battalion can stand alone without American guidance, backup, direction and fire support.

This was the only real hope of beginning to hand off responsibility for Iraq's future to Iraqis. And it has blown away on those cold winds blowing through the nation's capital.
more at link
http://www.centredaily.com/mld/centredaily/news/opinion/12862435.htm?template=contentModules/printstory.jsp

Rumsfeld resigning? Sounds good to me. Wonder which crony Smirk will choose to replace him?

[mahatmakanejeeves]

1. Tar Pit

How the Land of the Free Became the Dinosaur in the Tar Pit

"From the brief time that we did spend occupying Iraqi territory after the war, I am certain that had we taken all of Iraq, we would have been like the dinosaur in the tar pit -- we would still be there, and we, not the United Nations, would be bearing the costs of the occupation. This is a burden I am sure the beleaguered American taxpayer would not have been happy to take on."-- Norman Schwarzkopf, from his 1993 autobiography, It Doesn't Take a Hero

"We should not march into Baghdad. To occupy Iraq would instantly shatter our coalition, turning the whole Arab world against us and make a broken tyrant into a latter-day Arab hero. Assigning young soldiers to a fruitless hunt for a securely entrenched dictator and condemning them to fight in what would be an unwinnable urban guerilla war, it could only plunge that part of the world into ever greater instability." - George H.W. Bush, A World Transformed, 1998

Note that the article is over two years old. It is still timely.

[mourningdove92]

2. good quotes!

[mahatmakanejeeves]

3. They end arguments quickly.

.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

4. Sandtrap