Quote:
Originally posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy
So scroll, boy, scroll!
It is a quagmire because we do not have a clear strategy for settling the place down and exiting, and, indeed, every indication is that control over the country by central authorities is weakening, not strengthening. Ty won't embrace the word quagmire, but he also hasn't had, that I know of, relatives under fire there and in Afghanistan.
The fact that we have a major commitment in Afghanistan, on the front lines against terror, and are fielding just 17,000 troops there is horrendous, and it is a result of getting tied up in a quagmire in Iraq.
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Seymour Hersh's use of the word during the war was, in retrospect, dead wrong. I just read his book, and he's big enough to acknowledge it now. It's clear from his book that he has very, very good sources in the military who feed him juicy stuff, but that for whatever reason -- perhaps because he's writing magazine articles on deadline, perhaps because the material is so sensitive -- he has a hard time of putting it in context and fleshing it out. It's no secret that many in the military resisted Rumsfeld's desire to fight the war with fewer forces, and conveyed their concerns to Hersh at a time when our advance appeared to be bogging down. (For the record, I posted at the outset that the war would last four weeks, and I was just about right.)
But Hersh also points out that the insistence that we commit fewer troops has handicapped us ever since we took Baghdad, and this week Paul Bremer admitted the same thing in public. Iraq certainly looks like a mess now with no attractive prospects.
