Tough to Argue Against Numbers
Comparing the US invasion of Iraq to the French venture into Algeria, I'd say we're doing all right. Maybe Rumsfeld is a genius. Less troops, less casualties, right?
What the fuck do all the Monday morning quarterbacks know?http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif
1 comment:
The argument he is making is that "more troops on the ground" wasn't necessarily the magic solution that some war critics seem to think it is. How can you possibly say that more troops would've meant more stability? Maybe it would have. Maybe it would've meant deaths on both sides and a larger insurgency that included Shiites and Kurds. I don't see how one can argue that more troops would have NECESSARILY meant a better result.
And particularly among those who supported the war and the troop numbers when the decision was made and now say it was the wrong decision. This to me is rather absurd. The world does not work with perfect information. Mistakes were made and hindsight is 20/20, but read the Foreign Affairs article about Saddam's internal thinking about the war and generally how his regime operated. To think "containment" as a long term solution is wishful thinking. This country was broken for 20 years of backwardsness - and this country is a metaphor for the entire region. The autocrats were on their way out, their hold on power untenable. Islamcist thought was waiting in the wings to take control over Iraq and other broken states, and our best bet to steer these places away from such a dark future, was more involvement, not less. Maybe the timing was off, maybe there were some details we that could have been handled better, but in the long term (so long as we're dependent on the mideast for oil), our military, economic, and political involvement over there is inevitable.
As far as I can see the basic difference opinions from reasonable people are:
a) Going into Iraq was always a bad idea, so basically a continued policy of containment.
b) Going into Iraq is a better idea than containment, but Bush's team couldn't execute right. So basically we go back to a default of containment.
c) Going into Iraq is a better idea than containment, so we should try it, and if it fails, learn a lesson and don't do it again. if it succeeds, good. I believe we are both on this level and you think it's failed already, and I don't.
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