War Bloggers
Over the last few months I haven’t been paying much attention to the winger warbloggers, because 1) I consider them to be, in the words of the veep, “just a few dead-enders” with an inexplicable loyalty to a failed regime, and 2) because the few times I have visited, the sour grapes have been so overwhelming that they crowded out even the minimum amount of serious policy discussion that occurs there in the absence of a bloody election fight.
But I went over to Redstate.com yesterday to see what was on the minds of the loyal opposition, and I really had a hard time believing my eyes. The post is entitled--get this--“Dems Seek To Ensure Defeat As President Bush Plans Victory,” and here are a few choice selections:
President Bush has been hard at work reorganizing his security team and seeking advice and ideas from a wide variety of sources on how to achieve victory in Iraq.
I'll get back to the President's thorough review of war strategy in a minute, but first, think about how the Democrats have responded to the President Bush's careful review of our war strategy. There is no other way to describe it: the Congressional Democratic leadership is trying to ensure defeat.
It is disappointing, but not surprising, that the Democratic leaders wouldn't demonstrate the common sense to listen to how we can achieve victory in Iraq before telling the world we must accept defeat and withdraw, or "redeploy," as the Democrats phrase it.
President Bush has been gathering advice from leaders here, leaders in Iraq, and allies globally. He has gone through this effort to find common ground, as he says, "not for the good of the Republican Party or the Democratic Party, but for the good of the country.
Our security and the future of a vital region of the world depend on victory in Iraq. It's too bad Democratic leaders won't even listen to how it can be achieved.
I hate to use the word “objective” in political discussions; it’s usually applied, as a rhetorical trick, to something utterly subjective in order to lend it weight and credence. But these statements are as objectively those of a madman as the lunatic ravings of Baghdad Bob when he claimed that US troops were committing suicide at the gates of Baghdad.
Reading him, you almost feel at a loss for words; the questions that arise in response to this childlike profession of faith are so numerous and urgent that you want to vomit them all out simultaneously. You want to sneer at and ridicule the insincere innocence of his tone, but then, being a decent person, you say to yourself “He can’t really write crap like this and not believe it, can he?” and so you’re forced to conclude that the innocence is real, and then your skin begins to crawl and your head begins to hurt, and, oh boy, here come those vomitous questions again…
However, you recover your composure and settle your stomach with some delicious Vernor’s (Michigan’s Own!) ginger ale, and jot down the following simple question, based on the following unambiguous information (which, not being very well read yourself, you steal from one of the bloggers who actually knows what he’s talking about):
The big talk this past week, and probably the centerpiece of Bush's announcement (to take place Wednesday night), is the "surge"—20,000 additional U.S. combat troops to be deployed to Baghdad, as part of a classic strategy of "clear, hold, and build." This means swooping a lot of troops into a particular area (a town, a village, a neighborhood, whatever), clearing it of insurgents (i.e., killing or capturing them), and leaving behind enough troops or police to maintain order so that reconstruction can take place—while other troops move on to clear, hold, and build in the next troubled area on the list.
Petraeus and his co-authors discussed this strategy at great length in the Army's counterinsurgency field manual. One point they made is that it requires a lot of manpower—at minimum, 20 combat troops for every 1,000 people in the area's population. Baghdad has about 6 million people; so clearing, holding, and building it will require about 120,000 combat troops.
Right now, the United States has about 70,000 combat troops in all of Iraq (another 60,000 or so are support troops or headquarters personnel). Even an extra 20,000 would leave the force well short of the minimum required—and that's with every soldier and Marine in Iraq moved to Baghdad. Iraqi security forces would have to make up the deficit.”
The question is: how does what the president is going to propose even approach a serious strategy if it utterly fails to meet the Army’s own minimum standards for troop strength in such a scenario? Does this sound like a familiar refrain to any of you? And even if he wanted to get serious about the surge, where would he find these several hundred thousand extra troops? There is nothing leftish about asking these questions, but the warbloggers have staked their shredded reputations on slavish devotion to their man-child king, so even attacking him from the right is apparently out of the question for many of them.
But I went over to Redstate.com yesterday to see what was on the minds of the loyal opposition, and I really had a hard time believing my eyes. The post is entitled--get this--“Dems Seek To Ensure Defeat As President Bush Plans Victory,” and here are a few choice selections:
President Bush has been hard at work reorganizing his security team and seeking advice and ideas from a wide variety of sources on how to achieve victory in Iraq.
I'll get back to the President's thorough review of war strategy in a minute, but first, think about how the Democrats have responded to the President Bush's careful review of our war strategy. There is no other way to describe it: the Congressional Democratic leadership is trying to ensure defeat.
It is disappointing, but not surprising, that the Democratic leaders wouldn't demonstrate the common sense to listen to how we can achieve victory in Iraq before telling the world we must accept defeat and withdraw, or "redeploy," as the Democrats phrase it.
President Bush has been gathering advice from leaders here, leaders in Iraq, and allies globally. He has gone through this effort to find common ground, as he says, "not for the good of the Republican Party or the Democratic Party, but for the good of the country.
Our security and the future of a vital region of the world depend on victory in Iraq. It's too bad Democratic leaders won't even listen to how it can be achieved.
I hate to use the word “objective” in political discussions; it’s usually applied, as a rhetorical trick, to something utterly subjective in order to lend it weight and credence. But these statements are as objectively those of a madman as the lunatic ravings of Baghdad Bob when he claimed that US troops were committing suicide at the gates of Baghdad.
Reading him, you almost feel at a loss for words; the questions that arise in response to this childlike profession of faith are so numerous and urgent that you want to vomit them all out simultaneously. You want to sneer at and ridicule the insincere innocence of his tone, but then, being a decent person, you say to yourself “He can’t really write crap like this and not believe it, can he?” and so you’re forced to conclude that the innocence is real, and then your skin begins to crawl and your head begins to hurt, and, oh boy, here come those vomitous questions again…
However, you recover your composure and settle your stomach with some delicious Vernor’s (Michigan’s Own!) ginger ale, and jot down the following simple question, based on the following unambiguous information (which, not being very well read yourself, you steal from one of the bloggers who actually knows what he’s talking about):
The big talk this past week, and probably the centerpiece of Bush's announcement (to take place Wednesday night), is the "surge"—20,000 additional U.S. combat troops to be deployed to Baghdad, as part of a classic strategy of "clear, hold, and build." This means swooping a lot of troops into a particular area (a town, a village, a neighborhood, whatever), clearing it of insurgents (i.e., killing or capturing them), and leaving behind enough troops or police to maintain order so that reconstruction can take place—while other troops move on to clear, hold, and build in the next troubled area on the list.
Petraeus and his co-authors discussed this strategy at great length in the Army's counterinsurgency field manual. One point they made is that it requires a lot of manpower—at minimum, 20 combat troops for every 1,000 people in the area's population. Baghdad has about 6 million people; so clearing, holding, and building it will require about 120,000 combat troops.
Right now, the United States has about 70,000 combat troops in all of Iraq (another 60,000 or so are support troops or headquarters personnel). Even an extra 20,000 would leave the force well short of the minimum required—and that's with every soldier and Marine in Iraq moved to Baghdad. Iraqi security forces would have to make up the deficit.”
The question is: how does what the president is going to propose even approach a serious strategy if it utterly fails to meet the Army’s own minimum standards for troop strength in such a scenario? Does this sound like a familiar refrain to any of you? And even if he wanted to get serious about the surge, where would he find these several hundred thousand extra troops? There is nothing leftish about asking these questions, but the warbloggers have staked their shredded reputations on slavish devotion to their man-child king, so even attacking him from the right is apparently out of the question for many of them.
posted by Mockrates at 2:09 PM
2 Comments:
Hey Cletus,
I notice the date of the next meeting but not the title of Sullivan's book.
Let me just say for my sake and no one else's that Sullivan is the biggest asshole imaginable. In the words of Rowan Atkinson, he is the kind of man that people emigrate to avoid.
To be exact, Sullivan is where "Various Iraq Books" should be, and vice versa.
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