But don’t those officers understand that the only real front is the home front, and the only serious battle the PR fight? Compared to the MSM and the Democrats, Al Qaeda poses only a trivial threat to our precious bodily fluids… ~Robert Farley
Farley is commenting on this report and the complaints of officers about the public comments by top commanders prior to the offensive. While Gen. Odierno does his best to play down these complaints, they have some substance. The story continues:
Still, he implied American commanders may have played a part by flagging the offensive in advance. “I think they were tipped off by us talking about the surge, the fact that we have a problem in Diyala Province,” he said.
Not to dwell on the obvious too much, but “the fact we have a problem in Diyala Province” is more or less a direct result of the “surge” taking place in Baghdad. Certainly those targeted by the “surge” in Baghdad and who have since moved into Diyala Province would have been aware, well before any public remarks were made, that there would eventually be a “surge” directed at them where they are…since they had been the targets of the “surge” in Baghdad. This presents a basic, frequently predicted difficulty: if the targets of the “surge” are frequently leaving a place before each offensive, the securing of that place will be temporary at best and leads to other areas becoming new bases for insurgents. This seems to be uncannily like the situation during the “hold, clear and build” months in 2006. I also remember someone remarking years back on the clearing of Fallujah being like sweeping and spreading hot embers around so they will catch fire to many more places, which seems to be what is happening today. Someone will still really have to explain to me how this “surge” represents anything new in terms of military tactics that differ significantly from 2004.
I know the official line–now we’re really, really serious about training the Iraqi military and the Iraqis really have to make political progress. Those remain the two critical pieces of the puzzle, and neither one of them is happening at anywhere near a satisfactory pace. This sticks the military with a basically impossible task of chasing insurgents around the country with too few men in the hopes of conjuring some level of stability that will somehow facilitate a political settlement that none of the major factions seems terribly interested in creating under any circumstances. It is therefore difficult for me to understand why it is boo-worthy when Clinton said that the Iraqis were failing to do what needed to be done on their end. In some sense it is a cop-out for our political class as a way of avoiding their own responsibility, and it is certainly unfair, as I have said many times, to have expected Iraqis to have magically conjured up a functioning representative government with absolutely no relevant experience or political tradition on which they can rely. That doesn’t make Iraqi failure to achieve certain levels of political cooperation and military effectiveness any less real. It isn’t as if Iraqis have perversely desired failure, but they have been presented with a wrecked country, few resources and little relevant expertise and told by the people who helped destroy the country, “Here, you fix this–pronto!”
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June 23rd, 2007 at 11:29 pm
tedschan
Unfortunately Tancredo was also making similar remarks during the last debate, about how Iraqis have to take responsibility for making their democracy work and so on–this and his Jack Bauer comment really turned me off, and even if he’s good on immigration, he seems to be an one-issue candidate.
June 23rd, 2007 at 11:47 pm
Daniel Larison
As Republicans used to understand, or at least as they pretended to understand in the past, this is why nation-building by an outside power usually doesn’t work. It involves making the success of your policy dependent on the performance of people over whom you are not supposed to have any control and whom you could not actually coerce even if you wanted to. They have their own interests and concerns, and they have their own timetables for when and how they will get things done. This is why tying our presence there to their successes is crazy. Blaming the Iraqis is just about the only face-saving method GOP war supporters have for abandoning the war, but it creates the false impression that everything would have gone just fine if it hadn’t been for the people in the other country. In the end, it is entirely a device for avoiding responsibility, and as such it is a dangerous habit for our politicians to have.
In fact, Tancredo is also quite good on life questions, and he got his high ACU rating mostly for good reasons. It is true, however, that he seems to come more from the hard nationalist side of the GOP than the smart constitutionalist sliver.
June 24th, 2007 at 12:08 am
tedschan
I hadn’t considered his position on the life questions, though I was thinking more of what he uses to set himself apart from the other candidates… unfortunately the debates haven’t really given him the opportunity to explain his positions on other questions.