My friend (and
Stragglyrs drummer) Bill Mishler recently sent me this:
From the Washington Post 7/31/08:
About 145,000 troops remain on the ground in Iraq, now that all the combat brigades sent last year as part of the so-called surge have returned home as of this month. But that's still higher than the roughly 130,000-135,000 who were there before the troop increase.
"The progress is still reversible," President Bush acknowledged.
COALITION FORCES Feb. 2007
US -132,000
UK - 7,100
South Korea - 2,300
Poland - 900
Georgia - 800
Australia - 900
Romania - 600
Denmark - 460
El Salvador - 380
Bulgaria - 150
-- BBC
From Bill:
It seems to me that a surge is a temporary increase in forces so that when levels are reduced below the original level, improvement takes hold.
We still have 13,000 more troops than before the "surge," so it remains to be seen whether it was a surge at all and whether the "surge worked."
What the surge has succeeded in doing is prolonging, for a year and a half, a war that never should have occurred in the first place. It also has upped the monthly cost of the war to $12 billion a month, all on the supply-side tax cut credit card.
We have committed $2 trillion, 5 years and 4 months, 4,200 troops, 40,000 serious U.S. injuries, 86,000 Iraqi civilian dead and total war dead of at least 700,000 to tamp down an insurgency that we created in the first place by invading Iraq based on unconfirmed intelligence on WMD, ties to 9/11 and ties to al Qeada, all of which proved false.
When we get to 132,000 troops and below, will the reduced level of violence remain?
In my view, it depends on whether the Iraqis think, as they do now, that we are leaving in 2009 and 2010. If they think we are staying indefinitely with the intent to take their oil, the insurgency may return with a vengeance.
After intitially resisting the "surge" and killing 1,000 U.S. troops in 2007 and early 2008, the insurgents have engaged in the soft retreat I and many other war critics predicted.
And it must be pointed out that the Anbar Awakening began in the summer of 2006 while the surge began in late winter-early spring of 2007.
A recent ABC poll showed 71 percent of the Iraqis want us to leave. The Iraqis and the Iraqi government want a withdrawal timetable. A timetable is to withdrawal as wheels are to a car.
If we have a "commitment to the Iraqi people," is it not to respect their sovereignty, give them back their country and let them begin to decide their own fate?
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