"The time scale to succeed is years," said John J. Hamre, a former deputy defense secretary, while "the time scale for tolerance here is 12 months for Democrats and 18 months for Republicans."
...Officers say many questions remain about the sustainability of any positive momentum. Military operations can buy time but cannot solve basic problems in Iraq: the growing threat of a civil war.
..."All the talk about pullouts, votes, and budgets doesn't really matter to the 18-year old with his body armor driving across Iraq, worried about IED's," said an Army officer recently returned from Iraq. "For him, life consists of trying to survive for 365 days to get back home--only to know he'll have to come back again."
--"Politics Colllide With Iraq Realities," Thomas E. Ricks, Washington Post, April 8, 2007
As the only Iraq war veteran in Congress, Representative Patrick Murphy...was a junior House whip--a point man, in Army lingo--in the Democrats' recent passage of a war budget that included timelines for an exit from Iraq...
"President Bush and Vice President Cheney have called me and my colleagues unpatriotic for that vote," Mr. Murphy said, admitting this still had his Irish up. "With all due respect to Mr. Cheney who had--what was it?--'better things to do' during Vietnam and got four deferments, I don't think he's in a position to question my patriotism."
...Mr. Murphy, a 33-year old Congressional freshman...(checked with his buddies from Iraq, many on their third tours)..."The guys said it's like Groundhog Day all over, four years later."
--"Back from Iraq at the Great American Diner," Francis X. Clines, New York Times, April 8, 2007
"The center will not hold, no matter what happens in the Washington standoff over war funding. Surely no one understands this better than (Senator John) McCain that American lives are being wasted in the war's escalation. That is what he said on David Letterman's show in an unguarded moment some five weeks ago--though he recanted the word after taking flak the morning after.
--"Sunday in the Market With McCain," Frank Rich, New York Times op-ed, September 8, 2007
"When my son deployed to Iraq in Nov. '04 with the Marine Corps to fight in the battle to clear insurgents out of Fallujah, we were all told that "the next six months" were going to be crucial, because the Iraqis were going to vote.
"When he deployed again in January of '06, we were all told that "the next six months" were crucial because a government was being established.
"The first thing my son talked about when he called on sat phones from rooftops watching for snipers or huddled around a campfire, he said that the most discouraging thing about the deployment was that it seemed "Fallujah is as bad as it was before we went in," because all the insurgents who'd fled to outlying areas had only crept back into the beleagured city.
"Three weeks into his second deployment, the mosque at Samarra was bombed, and he and the Marines in the Anbar fought for their lives for seven miserable months, and my son came home angry because he felt as if their fight and their losses "has all been a waste."
"All they were doing, he said, was, "going out every day and waiting to get blown up."
"My nephew had similar observations in HIS three deployments to Iraq with the Marines. And "the next six months" were always crucial.
"Now, another beloved nephew has just deployed to Baghdad with the army, and hey! Guess what!
"THE NEXT SIX MONTHS ARE CRUCIAL.
"I don't give a damn what John McCain says anymore because he flat-out lied when he pretended that things were better because he could stroll through a marketplace.
"I don't know a single Marine who has had the luxury of STROLLING anywhere in that godforsaken country.
"And now, thanks to this miserable escalation, my son's unit orders have been changed, to go back a FOURTH time (thankfully, he'll be out by then, if they let him)--and he's calling me in despair, wanting to know what the Democrats are doing to end this bloodbath and get his buddies out of that meatgrinder.
"I cannot describe the rage I feel whenever I see Bush and anyone backing him using troops as some kind of stage-prop, talking about how the next six months are crucial and we should "support the troops."
"The threatened chaos IS ALREADY HAPPENING, and our men and wmoen are just caught in the crossfire. I don't mind a phased redeployment and benchmarks for the Iraqi government, but the truth is that the military CAN'T stay much longer because they're stretched to the breaking point.
"We can support them all by getting them the hell out of there and rewarding politicians who pray to the god of patriotism by throwing them out of office or not electing them in the first place."
These were remarks that I made in a comment posted on Talking Points Memo (www.talkingpointsmemo.com) over on the "Election Central" board run by the insightful Greg Sargent, on his post, "McCain: Every Sensible Observer Favors Giving Escalation a Chance."
Talking Points Memo is probably the smartest progressive political blog out there, and I usually try to sound at least half-way smart when I post comments, because this is a place where smart people hang out, and the debate is intellectual in nature. (Very stimulating and interesting, by the way. I encourage you to check it out.)
But the truth is that whenever I even THINK about the McCain Sunday Stroll I get so angry, and my emotions were betrayed in my post.
I felt better, though, when I read the comments by Congressman Murphy in the New York Times profile. During his deployment to Baghdad in 2003, he lost 19 from his unit, and he carries their names in his pocket with him every single day of his life.
Some of those same buddies are back over there for the third time, and I had already decided to title this post "Groundhog Day" when I read that his buddy had referred to what's going on in Iraq right now by that very same term.
But what really got my attention was the brutally honest appraisal by Washington Post war correspondent, Tom Ricks, "Politics Collide With Iraq Realities."
Those of you who've been with me a while will recall that, until his retirement a few short months ago, my brother-in-law was a Brigadier General with the U.S. Army Special Forces. He had more than 30 years in the Green Berets, during which time he spent some time negotiating with warlords in Kosovo and, later, with warlords in Afghanistan.
His twin sons are both active-duty Army, one in Special Forces and one with an Army unit that just deployed to Baghdad.
And Richard told me during a recent visit that, using classic counter-insurgency tactics described by General Petraeus, would require TWO GENERATIONS for success in Iraq.
He said that it's too late to win over the current generation of Iraqis, that they already hate us and we can't fix that. If we want to win over the country now, we'll have to do it patiently over decades.
According to Tom Ricks' analysis, quoting an official in Iraq:
"There is no way we can defeat this insurgency by summer...To defeat it completely is a five-to-ten year project, minimum--and rushing it along to meet a D.C. timeline is dooming it to failure."
Yet in that same article, Ricks quotes an officer who has just returned from Iraq as saying that the United States military simply cannot this escalation indefinitely. As Frank Rich pointed out in his outstanding Times summary of where things stand in Iraq, we can't keep calling on the National Guard to bail us out forever.
Both Tom Ricks and Frank Rich spell out that, although there may be a few short-term gains in stability in Baghdad (such as fewer militia torture-murders)--which I am sure this administration will trumpet to the heavens on every venue they can find in order to justify their own insistence on "victory,"--the truth is just exactly what a Marine grunt told his mom more than a year ago:
THE BAD GUYS MELT INTO THE DESERT AND INTO SURROUNDING VILLAGES TO KILL RAPE PLUNDER AND DESTROY, LIKE COCKROACHES FLEE THE LIGHT. IT DOES NOT GET RID OF THEM. IT DOES NOT END THE WAR. THERE IS NO VICTORY.
Bush once declared Tal Afar "a free city that gives reason for hope for a free Iraq," after General Petraeus, using his patented counterinsurgency methods, cleaned it out.
Then Petraeus went home. Now, as Frank Rich describes it, it is a "cauldron of bloodshed." The same or similar fates have occurred to cities once touted as success stories: Kirkuk, Mosul, and Basra.
Now, sources on the ground are reporting that the bad guys who melted out of Baghdad have regrouped in Diyala--once a very quiet place--and have dealt stunning casualties to our troops there as well as the people who live there.
Meanwhile, American military casualties were DOUBLE that of Iraqi army casualties in March. We're just going in, fighting their war for them.
And dying for them.
John McCain himself, in Senate hearings, referred to what's going on in Iraq as "a game of Whack-a-Mole."
You know what that is, don't you? At a carnival, little groundhog figures pop up out of holes in the table and you have to try and whack them all if you want to win, but it's impossible, because no sooner do you whack one in the middle than one pops up south of that, or north of that, until you are just whacking whacking whacking all over the table.
And the next day, when you wake up, you get to do it all over again.
And the day after that.
And the week after that.
And the month after that.
And the year after that.
And if you live, you get to go home for a few months, and then you get to go back and play the game all over again.
If you live through it.
