The "double down" delusion

December 18th, 2006

Harry Reid said over the weekend that he’s okey-doke with Dubby’s double down, his plan to “surge” with up to 50,000 troops, as long as it only lasts three months. Reid’s behind the eight-ball … it is not our national disposition to accept “losing” gracefully. “One last shot at it” has appeal to those last “unreality” types that have not moved beyond their bruised ego, or that think Islamic terrorists hide behind every tree.

Wish somebody besides a reporter had faced off with him — wish somebody had said:

You’re a really nice, civil kinda guy, Harry — but taking Dubby at his word is absurd … three months will be three years will be thirty. George W. Bush is one of the world’s all-time great liars and your constituents doubt his sanity by the millions. Don’t make them doubt yours! When even long-silent Pottery Barn theorist Colin Powell says this is a pitiful attempt at rescuing a failed mission, you need to be a little less cheerful about throwing the last of a broken military into the fire. Remember why you were elected, Senator — to be part of the SOLUTION, not the problem! Pfffft!

Retired General Jack Keane followed Harry to tell George Stephanopolous about HIS plan … the one Dubby favors. I’ve posted a Fred Barnes op/ed that lays it out … you should know about it, since, barring a miracle, it’s going to happen soon.

A collection including Powell, how “broke” the Army really is — toward the last, an op/ed by our waspish [and usually accurate] friend, MoDo.

Jude

Powell Says US Losing in Iraq, Calls for Drawdown by Mid-2007
Comments break long public silence on the war
Karen DeYoung, The Washington Post
Monday 18 December 2006

Former secretary of state Colin L. Powell said today that the United States is losing what he described as a “civil war” in Iraq and that he is not persuaded that an increase in U.S. troops there would reverse the situation. Instead, he called for a new strategy that would relinquish responsibility for Iraqi security to the government in Baghdad sooner rather than later, with a U.S. drawdown to begin by the middle of next year.

Powell’s comments broke his long public silence on the issue and placed him at odds with the administration. President Bush is considering options for a new military strategy - among them a “surge” of 15,000 to 30,000 troops added to the current 140,000 in Iraq, to secure Baghdad and to accelerate the training of Iraqi forces, as Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and others have proposed; or a redirection of the U.S. military away from fighting the insurgency to focus mainly on hunting al-Qaeda terrorists, as the nation’s top military leaders proposed last week in a meeting with the president.

But Bush has rejected the dire conclusions of the Iraq Study Group and its recommendations to set parameters for a phased withdrawal to begin next year, and he has insisted that the Iraq insurgency is not a civil war.

“I agree with the assessment of Mr. Baker and Mr. Hamilton,” Powell said, referring to the study group’s leaders James A. Baker and Lee Hamilton. The situation in Iraq is “grave and deteriorating and we’re not winning, we are losing. We haven’t lost. And this is the time, now, to start to put in place the kinds of strategies that will turn this situation around.”

Speaking on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Powell seemed to draw as much from his 35-year Army career, including four years as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as from his more recent difficult tenure as Bush’s chief diplomat.

Last summer’s surge of U.S. troops to try to stabilize Baghdad had failed, he said, and any new attempt was unlikely to succeed. “If somebody proposes that additional troops be sent, if I was still chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, my first question … is what mission is it these troops are supposed to accomplish … is it something that is really accomplishable … do we have enough troops to accomplish it?”

Although he said he agreed with Central Command head Gen. John Abizaid that there should be an increase in U.S. advisers to the Iraqi military, “sooner or later you have to begin the baton pass, passing it off to the Iraqis for their security and to begin the draw-down of U.S. forces. I think that’s got to happen sometime before the middle of next year.”

Before any decision to increase troops, “I’d want to have a clear understanding of what it is they’re going for, how long they’re going for. And let’s be clear about something else…. There really are no additional troops. All we would be doing is keeping some of the troops who were there, there longer and escalating or accelerating the arrival of other troops.”

“That’s how you surge. And that surge cannot be sustained.” The “active Army is about broken,” Powell said. Even beyond Iraq, the Army and Marines have to “grow in size, in my military judgment,” and Congress must provide significant additional funding to sustain them.

Powell also agreed with the study group’s recommendation that the administration open talks with Syria and Iran as it gropes for a solution to the Iraq problem. Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have explicitly rejected talks until Syria ends its destabilizing influence in Lebanon and support for anti-Israel militants, and until Iran suspends its nuclear enrichment program. The administration has charged both countries with aiding the Iraqi insurgency.

“Do they get marginal support from Iran and Syria? You bet they do,” Powell said of the Iraqis. “I have no illusions that either Syria or Iran want to help us in Iraq. I am also quite confident that what is happening in Iraq is self-generated for the most part. The money, the resources, the weapons are in Iraq already.”

“Are Iran and Syria regimes that I look down upon? I certainly do. But at the same time, I’ve looked down on many people over the years, in the course of my military and diplomatic career, and I still had to talk to them.”

During Bush’s first term, Powell was often on the losing side of disagreements with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Vice President Cheney and the president himself over a range of foreign policy issues, including the Arab-Israeli peace process, North Korea and Iraq. Although he ultimately supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq - and played a major role in building public backing for war when he delivered a U.N. Security Council speech saying that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction that posed an urgent threat to U.S. security - he objected to the administration’s detention and interrogation policies of “enemy combatants” and privately questioned the lack of planning and troop-strength for post-war Iraq.

His low-key departure from office in January 2005, following Bush’s request for his resignation, stood in contrast to last Friday’s ceremonial farewell to Rumsfeld, whose retirement festivities at the Pentagon was attended by Bush and Cheney. Asked today whether he agreed with Cheney’s assessment that Rumsfeld had been “the finest defense secretary the nation has ever had,” Powell demurred.

“Well, that’s the vice president’s judgment,” he said. “I’ve known many fine secretaries of defense…. But it’s history that will judge the performance of all of us in this troubling time … history that I think will ultimately be written as a result of what happens in Iraq.”

‘We’re Going to Win’
The president finally has a plan for victory
Fred Barnes, Weekly Standard
12/25/2006

It turns out you only have to attend a White House Christmas party to find out where President Bush is headed on Iraq. One guest who shook hands with Bush in the receiving line told him, “Don’t let the bastards get you down.” Bush, slightly startled but cheerful, replied, “Don’t worry. I’m not.” The guest followed up: “I think we can win in Iraq.” The president’s reply was emphatic: “We’re going to win.” Another guest informed Bush he’d given some advice to the Iraq Study Group, and said its report should be ignored. The president chuckled and said he’d made his position clear when he appeared with British prime minister Tony Blair. The report had never mentioned the possibility of American victory. Bush’s goal in Iraq, he said at the photo-op with Blair, is “victory.”

Now Bush is ready to gamble his presidency on a last-ditch effort to defeat the Sunni insurgency and establish a sustainable democracy in Iraq. He is prepared to defy the weary wisdom of Washington that it’s too late, that the war in Iraq is lost, and that Bush’s lone option is to retreat from Iraq as gracefully and with as little loss of face as possible. Bush only needed what his press secretary, Tony Snow, called a “plan for winning.” Now he has one.

It’s not to be found among the 79 recommendations of Jim Baker’s Iraq Study Group. The ISG report was tossed aside by the White House. Nor was the scheme leaked by the Pentagon last week ever close to being adopted. That plan would pull thousands of American troops out of a combat role and turn them into trainers of the Iraqi army. The result would be increased sectarian violence and an Iraqi army not yet equipped to quash the swelling insurgency-leading to a gap of time in which there would likely be a further–probably fatal–collapse of civic order in Baghdad, and then elsewhere in Iraq.

Last Monday Bush was, at last, briefed on an actual plan for victory in Iraq, one that is likely to be implemented. Retired General Jack Keane, the former vice chief of staff of the Army, gave him a thumbnail sketch of it during a meeting of five outside experts at the White House. The president’s reaction, according to a senior adviser, was “very positive.” Authored by Keane and military expert Frederick W. Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute, the plan (which can be read here) is well thought-out and detailed, but fundamentally quite simple. It is based on the idea–all but indisputable at this point–that no political solution is possible in Iraq until security is established, starting in Baghdad. The reverse–a bid to forge reconciliation between majority Shia and minority Sunni–is a nonstarter in a political environment drenched in the blood of sectarian killings.

Why would the Keane-Kagan plan succeed where earlier efforts failed? It envisions a temporary addition of 50,000 troops on the ground in Iraq. The initial mission would be to secure and hold the mixed Baghdad neighborhoods of Shia and Sunni residents where most of the violence occurs. Earlier efforts had cleared many of those sections of the city without holding them. After which, the mass killings resumed. Once neighborhoods are cleared, American and Iraqi troops in this plan would remain behind, living day-to-day among the population. Local government leaders would receive protection and rewards if they stepped in to provide basic services. Safe from retaliation by terrorists, residents would begin to cooperate with the Iraqi government. The securing of Baghdad would be followed by a full-scale drive to pacify the Sunni-majority Anbar province.

The truth is that not all of Iraq needs to be addressed by an increased American presence. Most of southern Iraq and all of the Kurdish north are close to being free of sectarian violence. It’s Baghdad that has become the “center of gravity” for the insurgency, according to Keane. And it could be brought under control by the end of 2007.

The Keane-Kagan plan is not revolutionary. Rather, it is an application of a counterinsurgency approach that has proved to be effective elsewhere, notably in Vietnam. There, Gen. Creighton Abrams cleared out the Viet Cong so successfully that the South Vietnamese government took control of the country. Only when Congress cut off funds to South Vietnam in 1974 were the North Vietnamese able to win.

Before Bush announces his “new way forward” in Iraq in early January, he wants to be assured of two things. The first is that his plan can succeed. Initial evaluations of the Keane-Kagan plan at the Pentagon and elsewhere in the government have been positive. Alone among proposals for Iraq, the new Keane-Kagan strategy has a chance to succeed. Bush’s second concern is to avert an explosion of opposition on Capitol Hill. Because this plan offers a credible prospect of winning in Iraq, moderate Democrats and queasy Republicans, the White House thinks, will be inclined to stand back and let Bush give it a shot.

The sooner Bush orders the plan into action, the better chances are that next Christmas he’ll be telling White House guests that winning in Iraq is not just a goal. It could actually be happening.

Despite a $168 Billion Budget, Army Faces Cash Crunch
Greg Jaffe, The Wall Street Journal
Tuesday 12 December 2006

Fort Stewart, Georgia - With just six weeks before they leave for Iraq, the 3,500 soldiers from the Third Infantry Division’s First Brigade should be learning about Ramadi, the insurgent stronghold where they will spend a year.

Many of the troops don’t even know the basic ethnic makeup of the largely Sunni city. “We haven’t spent as much time as I would like on learning the local culture, language, and politics - all the stuff that takes a while to really get good at,” says Lt. Col. Clifford Wheeler, who commands one of the brigade’s 800-soldier units.

Instead, the troops are learning to use equipment that commanders say they should ideally have been training with since the spring. Many soldiers only recently received their new M-4 rifles and rifle sights, which are in short supply because of an Army-wide cash crunch. Some still lack their machine guns or long-range surveillance systems, which are used to spot insurgents laying down roadside bombs. They’ve been told they’ll pick up most of that when they get to Iraq.

The strains here at Fort Stewart - one of the busiest posts in the U.S. military - are apparent throughout the Army. They spotlight a historic predicament: The Iraq war has exposed more than a decade’s worth of mistakes and miscalculations that are now seriously undermining the world’s mightiest military force.

In the 15 years after the Cold War, senior military planners and civilian-defense officials didn’t build a force geared to fighting long, grinding guerrilla wars, like Iraq and Afghanistan. Instead they banked on fighting quick wars, dominated by high-tech weapons systems.

The result: At a time when the war in Iraq is deepening, and debate over pulling out the troops is intensifying, the rising cost of waging the fight is outpacing even the Army’s huge budget. The financial squeeze is leaving the Army short of equipment and key personnel.

The situation has the Army seeking billions more for next year, even as younger officers, frustrated with the pace of change, say that any improvements depend more on how the money is spent than on how much is spent.

From 1990 to 2005, the military lavished money on billion-dollar destroyers, fighter jets and missile-defense systems. Defenders of such programs say the U.S. faces a broad array of threats and must be prepared for all of them. High-tech weaponry contributed to the swift toppling of the regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, but has been of little help in the more difficult task of stabilizing the two countries.

Of the $1.9 trillion the U.S. spent on weaponry in that period, adjusted for inflation, the Air Force received 36 percent and the Navy got 33 percent. The Army took in 16 percent, it says. Despite the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, both dominated by ground forces, the ratio hasn’t changed significantly.

Overly optimistic predictions by the Bush administration - and the Army - have made the Army’s budget crunch worse. Both assumed troop numbers in Iraq would drop significantly by 2006 and the Army wouldn’t need as much money as it initially requested. Instead, costs have soared, forcing front-line commanders and Pentagon generals to try to meet an ever-growing list of demands with insufficient resources.

“Our ground forces have been stretched nearly to the breaking point,” warned the bipartisan Iraq Study Group in its recent report. “The defense budget as a whole is in danger of disarray.”

It may seem hard to believe that a country which allocated $168 billion to the Army this year - more than twice the 2000 budget - can’t cover the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the two pillars of the Army, personnel and equipment - both built to wage high-tech, firepower-intensive wars - are under enormous stress:

The cost of basic equipment that soldiers carry into battle - helmets, rifles, body armor - has more than tripled to $25,000 from $7,000 in 1999.

The cost of a Humvee, with all the added armor, guns, electronic jammers and satellite-navigational systems, has grown seven-fold to about $225,000 a vehicle from $32,000 in 2001.

The cost of paying and training troops has grown 60 percent to about $120,000 per soldier, up from $75,000 in 2001. On the reserve side, such costs have doubled since 2001, to about $34,000 per soldier.

At Fort Knox, Ky., the cash crunch got so bad this summer that the Army ran out of money to pay janitors who clean the classrooms where captains are taught to be commanders. So the officers, who will soon be leading 100-soldier units, clean the office toilets themselves.

“The cost of the Army is being driven up by (Iraq and Afghanistan). That’s the fundamental story here,” says Brig. Gen. Andrew Twomey, a senior official on the Army staff in the Pentagon. The increased costs are “not from some wild weapons system that is off in the future. These are costs associated with current demands.”

Senior Army officials concede they mistakenly assumed prior to the Iraq war that if they built a force capable of winning big conventional battles, everything else - from counterinsurgency to peacekeeping - would be relatively easy. “We argued in those days that if we could do the top-end skills, we could do all of the other ones,” says Lt. Gen. Thomas Metz, the deputy commander of the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command. Iraq has proven that guerrilla fights demand different equipment and skills. “I have had to eat a little crow,” says Gen. Metz.

Army officials say they are doing their best to ensure that Iraq and Afghanistan-bound brigades have all the equipment they need when they arrive in the war zone. But to do this, they have had to take equipment from units training back home, which are now short of even the most basic gear, such as body armor and rifles.

The equipment shortages explain why Gen. John Abizaid, the top commander in the Middle East, recently told lawmakers that the U.S. couldn’t maintain even a relatively small increase of 20,000 soldiers in Iraq for more than a few months. “The ability to sustain that commitment is simply not something that we have right now,” he testified in November.

The other big strain on the Army is a shortage of people. The Army has made much of the fact that it met its recruiting goals for 2006, bringing in 80,000 soldiers. But meeting those goals has come at a heavy cost. The Army spent about $735 million on retention bonuses in 2006 to keep battle-weary troops in the service, up from about $85 million in 2003. And it had to pay about $300 million more on recruiting this year compared to the year before.

The extra cash didn’t stop the Army from having to lower standards. Although the quality of the force is still considered good, 8,500 recruits in 2006 required “moral waivers” for criminal misconduct or past drug use - more than triple the 2,260 waivers the Army issued 10 years ago. The Army also took in more troops who scored in the bottom third on its aptitude test.

As it has brought in more borderline recruits, the Army has found itself short of officers and sergeants. Today, it is down about 3,000 active-duty officers, a deficiency that it says will grow to about 3,700 in 2008. It is short more than 7,500 reserve and National Guard officers, according to internal Army documents.

One of the most pressing personnel problems is the lack of sergeants, the enlisted leaders who do most of the day-to-day supervising of the rank-and-file soldiers.

At Fort Hood, Texas, the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment, which returned from Iraq in March, has about 75 percent of the soldiers it needs to fill its ranks, but only about half of its sergeants. The 5,000-soldier unit likely will go back to Iraq in the fall of next year, and leaders in the regiment say they will get more sergeants before they deploy, but not as many as they would like.

“The sergeant is the one that the soldiers take after,” says First Sgt. James Adcock, who oversees about 130 of the unit’s soldiers. “He can make or break how effective the privates are.”

The large number of young soldiers in the unit combined with the shortage of sergeants has led to problems, say the regiment’s leaders. Some also blame the Army’s decision to scale back recruiting standards and push more troops through basic training. In May 2005, about 18 percent of Army’s recruits were asked to leave before completing initial training. Today, only about 6 percent of recruits fail to make it through.

The troops who a year ago might have flunked out of basic training seem to stick with their units, according to Army statistics. But some sergeants say they also seem to cause more problems. Sgt. First Class Rajesh Harripersad, who oversees a 30-soldier platoon, says two of his soldiers were caught using marijuana and methamphetamines. Other leaders have seen an increase in accidents on and off the base. “Discipline has been worse for me this time,” says Sgt. Harripersad.

Once units deploy to Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army-wide shortage of officers and sergeants is felt even more acutely. Teams focused on key jobs, such as reconstruction and Iraq governance, are “woefully undermanned,” Col. Bill Hix, a senior Pentagon strategist, recently wrote in the Hoover Digest, a Stanford University policy journal. Multiple internal Army studies have concluded that the military advisory teams, charged with developing Iraqi Army forces so U.S. troops can go home, need to be doubled or tripled in size.

Often, the soldiers who serve on these undermanned teams finish their year-long deployments wondering what they have accomplished. “I would say we’re an effective force for good, but we’re struggling in a sea of meaningless slaughter - along with everyone else with a job to do here,” says Sgt. Mastin Greene, who serves on a reconstruction team in Baghdad.

Some of the Army’s problems are a product of its failure to prepare for a guerrilla fight in which there are no front lines. Just prior to the Iraq war, the Army was buying body armor at such a slow rate that it would have taken 48 years to outfit the entire force. It invested huge sums in the years leading up to Iraq in Humvees with canvas doors that are useless for war today.

“The fact that we had certain grim realities that were inescapable for anyone who wore a uniform in a combat zone just wasn’t something that was driving our weapons programming,” says Maj. Gen. Stephen Speakes, who oversees equipping Army units. Army officials now say that they entered the war short of about $56 billion of essential equipment.

The Humvee stands as a metaphor for the problems the Army faces. First fielded in the early 1980s, it was designed to ferry soldiers around behind the front lines of a conventional war. In recent years, the vehicle, which troops drive on the streets of Iraq, has been modified countless times. The Army has bolted layers of armor onto it to protect troops from roadside bombs. It has added sophisticated electronic jammers, rotating turrets, bigger machine guns, satellite navigational systems and better radios.

The result is a Humvee that is much better than the version the Army took to Iraq in 2003. But the add-ons have driven up its cost. The modified vehicle is top heavy and tends to tip over at high speeds. Army officials say they can’t add more weight without overwhelming the engine or breaking the axle.

“The Army recognizes that the Humvee has reached a limit of our ability to improve it for the current fight,” Gen. Speakes says.

What the Army says it really needs is an all-new vehicle, designed to better withstand roadside bombs that have become part of life in Iraq. But such a vehicle likely won’t be ready until 2010 or 2012, Army officials say. In the interim, the Army wants to buy something on the commercial market - South Africa, Turkey and Australia all make alternatives. Yet it’s not clear whether the Army, which is struggling to equip the current force, has the money.

The Army has told the Bush administration it needs about $24 billion more to pay its bills in 2007. Some key lawmakers, such as Democratic Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island and Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona, have called for a bigger Army. But there are also pressures to restrain spending.

To cover cash shortfalls, Army posts around the country this summer laid off janitorial crews, closed swimming pools and didn’t cut the grass.

In the Pentagon, Army generals cut $3 billion in 2005 and 2006 from programs for weapons that are in heavy use in Iraq, such as armored patrol vehicles, trucks, radios and unmanned surveillance planes, according to Army documents. In June, for example, the Army set aside about $50 million to buy more long-range radios, which are used heavily in Iraq. One month later, Army officials, who were short about $1.5 billion to make end-of-year payroll, took the money back. Army brigades are supposed to have about 1,300 radios. Today, the average brigade makes do with about 1,100.

The shortages have been especially hard on the National Guard, which in some states has only about 40 percent of the authorized equipment for homeland defense missions, says Gen. Speakes.

Active-duty troops preparing to go off to war at bases such as Fort Stewart, Ga., feel the crunch as well. First Sgt. Bradley Feltman, who will leave in January for his second year-long tour in three years, says his troop was short of Humvees to train on and had only 25 percent of the mounts it needed for its machine guns. The lack of equipment hindered the unit’s ability to train as an entire 130-man unit. Instead, they trained one 30-soldier platoon at a time.

“We got training, but not graduate-level training. In a couple of months, my guys are going to be busting down doors, and it will be the first time they see some of their equipment for real,” he says.

At Fort Hood, the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment, which returned from Iraq in March and will go back in fall 2007, is already worried about time to prepare. The regiment will spend most of the winter receiving new soldiers, fielding new equipment and learning to use it. The regiment left most of its tanks and Humvees in Iraq for follow-on units.

That means troops won’t have much time to train for other critical tasks. Junior leaders need to know everything from how to assess a water plant to the tribal politics of the area where they are deploying, says Lt. Col. Paul Yingling, the unit’s deputy commander. They must know enough Arabic to interact with locals.

“It is incredibly frustrating for combat veterans to return to Iraq for the third time with only minimal training on the skills we know are essential, like language, culture, intelligence and local security force development” Col. Yingling says. “Army units don’t fail to train on these tasks because we’re stupid or lazy; we fail because we don’t have the time to do it right.”

What kind of Army emerges from its searing experience in Iraq will depend, in part, on how long the U.S. stays there and the foreign- policy goals that civilian leaders set in its aftermath. President Bush has said that the best way to protect the nation is to spread democracy. The experience in Iraq demonstrates that such a strategy requires a bigger Army that is more skilled in tasks such as building indigenous forces, fostering local government and economic development. “Revolutionary approaches require a lot of resources,” says Conrad Crane, the lead author of the Army’s new counterinsurgency doctrine.

A less-ambitious foreign policy that seeks to promote stability and preserve the status quo could reduce the pressure to build a bigger Army with a broader array of skills.

The other big variable is how the Army - particularly officers now in their 20s and 30s - reacts to the traumatic experience in Iraq. “We as an Army tend to learn generationally,” says Col. Michael Meese, who heads the department of social sciences at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

Today’s four-star generals, who joined the service in the early 1970s, spent most of their careers rebuilding an Army that had been badly damaged by Vietnam. Officers who came of age in the 1980s and are now colonels and generals were shaped by the Cold War. Their focus was on how to defeat a Soviet-style army.

Today’s younger officers, whose defining experiences have been in Iraq and Afghanistan, see the world differently. The gulf was clear last month in their reaction to the dismissal of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Many senior officers quietly celebrated his departure. Like the retired generals who earlier this year called for Mr. Rumsfeld to be fired, they placed the blame for the Army’s failures in Iraq largely on his shoulders.

Junior officers were more indifferent. They tended to view Mr. Rumsfeld as “part of a larger problem that hasn’t been solved yet,” says Kalev Sepp, a former Special Forces officer who worked extensively in Iraq. Among many of these officers, there is great frustration not just with the defense secretary but also with the generals who serve above them.

“Junior officers know that success in these wars is about a lot more than killing the enemy. It depends on providing security for the people, finding friends and fixing infrastructure,” says Maj. John Prior, who served as a company commander in Baghdad. “A lot of senior officers just don’t get it.”

While the Army’s new draft counterinsurgency doctrine sounds these same themes, senior commanders in Iraq have been slow to embrace them. The doctrine says troops must live among the Iraqi people, on small bases run by junior leaders. But since 2004, commanders have consolidated U.S. troops on 55 large fortified bases, down from about 110 a year ago.

The new doctrine says that when battling an insurgency, reconstruction dollars are as important as ammunition. In recent months, though, more restrictions have been placed on how junior leaders can spend money in their sectors. “What’s funny is that all politics and services are local, so the (junior) commanders need the greatest flexibility” said Brig. Gen. Ed Cardon, who returned from Iraq this year, in an interview compiled by the Army for its oral history archives. “Why don’t we just trust the commander who said he spent $100?”

Some question how quickly the Army will be able to shift its thinking. “All our organizations are designed around the least important line of operations in these fights - combat operations,” says Col. Yingling. “If you spend your whole career in tanks, you tend to see the solution to every problem as a tank.”

Farewell, Dense Prince
Maureen Dowd, NYT
Saturday, December 16, 2006

James Baker ran after W. with a butterfly net for a while, but it is now clear that the inmates are still running the asylum.

The Defiant Ones came striding from the Pentagon yesterday, the troika of wayward warriors marching abreast in their dark suits and power ties. W., Rummy and Dick Cheney were so full of quick-draw confidence that they might have been sauntering down the main drag of Deadwood.

Far from being run out of town, the defense czar who rivals Robert McNamara for deadly incompetence has been on a victory lap in Baghdad, Mosul and Washington. Yesterday’s tribute had full military honors, a color guard, a 19-gun salute, an Old Guard performance with marching musicians — including piccolo players — in Revolutionary War costumes, John Philip Sousa music and the chuckleheaded neocons and ex-Rummy deputies who helped screw up the occupation, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, cheering in the audience.

It was surreal: the septuagenarian who arrogantly dismissed initial advice to send more troops to secure Iraq, being praised as “the finest secretary of defense this nation has ever had” by his pal, the vice president, even as a desperate White House drafted ways to reinvade Iraq by sending more troops in a grasping-at-straws effort to reverse the chaos caused by Rummy’s mistakes.

Just imagine the send-off a defense secretary would have gotten who hadn’t sabotaged the Army, Iraq, global security, our chance to get Osama, our moral credibility, the deficit and American military confidence.

Even Joyce Rumsfeld got a Distinguished Public Service Award ribbon placed around her neck. The grandiose ceremony featured everything but the gold-plated matching set of pistols Tommy Franks, another failed warrior, and his wife, Cathy, recently received from a weapons manufacturer. (His had four stars and diamonds; hers, rubies and their marriage date.)

W. never seems as alarmed about the devastation in Iraq as he should be. He told People magazine “I must tell you, I’m sleeping a lot better than people would assume,” and he told Brit Hume that his presidency was “a joyful experience.”

He slacked off on his slacker effort to form a new Iraq plan. (Can’t these guys ever order pizzas and pull some all-nighters?) Mr. Bush was busy this week hosting Christmas parties for a press corps he disdains; convening a malaria conference at the National Geographic with Dr. Burke of “Grey’s Anatomy” Isaiah Washington; and presiding over a hero’s departure for the defense secretary he actually dumped, not because of incompetence but for political expediency.

The Rummy hoopla was a way for W. to signal his decision to shred the Baker-Hamilton study, after reportedly denouncing it as a flaming cowpie. Condi Rice signaled the same, telling The Washington Post that she did not want to negotiate with Syria and Iran, as the Iraq Study Group had proposed, because “the compensation” might be too high.

The Democrats thought that when they won the election, they won the debate on the war and they had W. cornered. But the president is leaning toward surging over the Democrats, voters, Baker and the Bush 41 crowd, and some of his own commanders.

W. seems gratified by the idea that rather than having his ears boxed by his father’s best friend, he’s going to go down swinging, or double down, in the metaphor du jour, on his macho bet in Iraq. He’s reading about Harry Truman and casting himself as a feisty Truman, but he’s heading toward late L.B.J. The White House budget office is studying how much it will cost to finance The Surge, an infusion of 20,000 to 50,000 troops into Baghdad to make one last try at “victory.” The policy would devolve from “We stand down as they stand up” to “We stand up more and maybe someday they will, too.”

Some serving commanders are not in favor of The Surge because they fret that it will infantilize Iraqis even more about assuming responsibility for their own security. They also fear that the insurgents, who have nowhere to go, will outwait our troops.

But W. would rather take a risk in Iraq than risk being a wimp. So he continued to wrap himself in muscular delusions, asserting that on Rummy’s watch, “the United States military helped the Iraqi people establish a constitutional democracy in the heart of the Middle East, a watershed event in the story of freedom.”

Dick Cheney offered this praise to his friend: “On the professional side, I would not be where I am today but for the confidence that Don first placed in me those many years ago.”

Alas, we wouldn’t be where we are today, either.

The Democrats’ Plantation Mentality
Cenk Uygur
Dec 18 2006

Harry Reid displayed classic Democratic plantation mentality on Sunday. When asked if he would support putting more troops in Iraq, he said he would as long as the president promised him it would be temporary in nature. I am sure the president will promise him that. And then the president will share a hearty, throaty laugh with Dick Cheney over how easy the Democrats are to push around.

Democrats need to shake the cobwebs out and realize they have been given power. They weren’t given power so that they can continue to bow down to the absurd ideas of this out of control administration.

For too long, Democrats have taken direction from the Republicans on what constitutes strength on national security matters. The country no longer believes that the Republicans have a strong or coherent national security policy. Not only do the Republicans need to come to terms with that, but so do the Democrats.

You won. You really won. And you didn’t win because the country thought Bush was right. You won because they thought YOU were right. Now, get used to it.

Everybody keeps talking about this troop “surge.” Yet no one seems to be able to tell us exactly what this surge will accomplish. So, I’ll say it in plain terms - it will accomplish dick.

For those not familiar with that vernacular, that means it won’t accomplish a damn thing. On what planet does an extra 30,000 American troops get the Shiites and the Sunnis to stop hating each other? How many times do we have to tell these people that Iraq needs a POLITICAL SOLUTION, not a military one?

If you combined all the armies of the world and brought them to Iraq and miraculously placated the country temporarily, you would still have the same exact problems the minute they all leave. Why? Because we don’t have a military problem, we have a POLITICAL PROBLEM.

The Sunnis and the Shiites don’t believe in a unified Iraq. They believe in protecting their own sect. All our wishful thinking and all of our troops aren’t going to change that fact.

Now, I understand that President Bush will probably never get this through his thick head. But I was hoping the Democrats understood this and understood that they needed to do whatever was necessary to redirect the president. If Reid did not misspeak, then they do not have this understanding at all. They still think they have to kowtow to this clown to appear tough on national security.

The guy squirts water out of a flower on his lapel. The big floppy red shoes and the red nose are supposed to be tip-offs. The man is a clown. Stop going near his flower, he is going to squirt you in the face again.

Here’s what Senator Reid should have said, “Are you kidding me? Are we going to allow more troops to go into this quagmire without any plan for solving the political problems in Iraq? Hell no. The American people did not stutter. They were not equivocal. They sent a message loud and clear - George Bush doesn’t know what he’s doing in Iraq. And we’re not going to send in another 30,000 troops to sit in the middle of a civil war. George Bush can’t even define what their mission would be. There is no military mission in Iraq. Until George Bush figures that out and finds a way to get the Iraqis to settle on a political solution, we’re not going to send in one more soldier or work with him on any other absurd request he has.”

I can’t believe the leader of the Democrats in the Senate would even contemplate sending in more troops to Iraq when there is no clearly defined mission. Once you agree to send in more guys, you have to agree to give the administration more time to make that plan work. And since it’s not a real plan, you’ll sit around in the same morass for another six to eighteen months.

Except this time, you will also be responsible.

We have to take the training wheels off now and the Democrats have to learn how to steer without taking direction from the clueless right. This is the time to stand up. Not the time to agree to more terrible Bush ideas on Iraq.

What’s right and good doesn’t come naturally. You have to stand up and fight for it - as if the cause depends on you, because it does. Allow yourself that conceit - to believe that the flame of Democracy will never go out as long as there’s one candle in your hand.
~ Bill Moyers

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