How Can We Lose If You Insist on Winning?
Wait a minute. He’s getting wacked for moving forward at all, and told its do or die this time. Congress is falling over itself trying to figure out how to surrender. Now, he’s getting wacked with claims he has no backup plan.
Never mind that the current plan seems to be working quite well. I would like to take this article as a positive sign, that the Washington Post is trying to tell the Surrender Enthusiasts its time to get on board and demand success in Iraq. Once you’ve got your surge on, what’s next? You can’t just … leave.
However, all that this frankly idiotic “when did you stop beating your wife” article does is warm over all the handwringing and examine the problems posed by any exit plan that does not include victory. It fails to note, as mentioned above, that the current plan is working and the real problem is planning for maintenance beyond the surge. I would expect better of Ricks but he’s got a lot invested in the notion of Bush administration failure.
The true tone of this article is set by the closing gotcha exchange between Condoleezza Rice and John Kerry:
Bush has warned that the U.S. commitment to Iraq is not open-ended and will require increased effort from Iraqis. Pressed to specify U.S. limits, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice promised the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that there would be ample opportunity “to see whether or not in fact the Iraqis are living up to the assurances they gave us.”
“And what if they don’t?” Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.)* asked.
“I don’t think you go to Plan B,” Rice replied. “You work with Plan A.”
That appears to be intended to show how ill-prepared the Bush administration is. But it pretty much sums up the anti-war camp’s contribution, while demonstrating the practical political constraints faced by a wartime presidency that is fighting on multiple fronts … one of the most critical being in Washington.
… Welcome Punditeers. If you liked this WaPo quest for failure, you’re gonna love Samantha Power’s cure for genocide.
* reader JeffS is depressed. But look on the bright side. Here’s someone we haven’t heard from in weeks. Must be hard at work on that support the troops.
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 10:33 am on Monday, March 5, 2007
18 Responses to “How Can We Lose If You Insist on Winning?”
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March 5th, 2007 at 10:35 am
Washington is a front on the war on terrorism, isn’t it? What a sad thought to greet me on a dreary Monday morning.
March 5th, 2007 at 12:29 pm
“Plan B”
Park 1 division in Kuwait, 2 more divisions at KKMC in Saudi Arabia(There is a turnkey base in Northern Saudi Arabia that was built in the ’70’s” to hold 60K troops, another division or 2 in Kurdistan. We will also need two aircraft carriers permenantly positiioned in the Gulf.
Everything south Baghdad will be ceded to Iran. At some point, various Sunni’s groups north of Baghdad will have to decide if they
A) Want to be part of Kurdistan I.E. How much further South of Kirkuk and Mosul will the “New” border be drawn.
B) Want to be part of Iran
C) Believe they can hold off the Iranian backed shiite militias in Baghdad,Diyala, and AlAnbar and prevail.
The $64,000 question is really what happens to AlAnbar…if it falls to Iran…the Saudi’s have a very long border with Iran…so the Saudi’s will either annex AlAnbar or provide plenty of funds to the residents of AlAnbar to protect the “Psuedo” border.
In any case, we are fundamentally back to the paradox of the Iran-Iraq war…while no one particularly liked Saddam…he provided a buffer space between the Saudis and Iranians.
The various players in the region really need to think about what happens if the short term goal of driving the infidel out of the region actually succeeds.
Iran gets the Basra oil fields…the flip side of that is the Kurds get Greenlighted to help themselves to as much of Northern Iraq,Iran and Syria as they think they can defend, and the Pakistanis get to help themselves to Western Iran as the Iranians will have to commit their forces to occupying their new territories.
Turkish objections “Plan B” will be bought off with a nice EU membership.
March 5th, 2007 at 1:10 pm
“Plan B is to make Plan A work”
Mum On Plan B Ed Morrissey The Pentagon has not discussed an alternate strategy for Iraq if the surge does not produce the desired results, the Washington Post reports. Peter Pace, Joint Chiefs chairman, parries such questions with the response that “…
March 5th, 2007 at 2:16 pm
So why don’t the Dems come up with a Plan B? Oh, that’s right, they have. Surrender in the face of victory to a bunch of pissant thugs and run home with your tail between your legs. Worked for Kerry once, why not again?
March 5th, 2007 at 2:17 pm
And the toad will be here to inform me about the history I lived in three, two, ….
March 5th, 2007 at 4:08 pm
No history lesson today, salty.
Never seen anyone on the right call Bush, Cheney & Co. a bunch of pissant thugs, though.
It is rather refreshing.
March 5th, 2007 at 5:23 pm
alphie:
blah blah blah.
You are a broken record.
What is Plan B? Well if you are a Democrat it is root for the enemy. But then that is Plan A too isn’t it?
March 5th, 2007 at 5:27 pm
Democrats have already provided the backup plan. Cut/Run/Defeat.
March 5th, 2007 at 6:03 pm
Some things are beyond success.
Or perhaps the bloodthirsty right can offer up their “plan for success” for 9/11?
March 5th, 2007 at 6:31 pm
The inanity of this leftist troll is even beyond the words used by the overwhelming majority of commenters used to describe IT, on Protein Wisdom. IT makes no sense, because IT has no sense.
My wish is the same as Grimmy’s and that is, somehow, someway, this person has a tragedy in his life, or to his life, that equals in some small, small way, the animalist tragedy that the Islamists visited on this country. And should ITget ITS way, IT just may.
In fact, there is reason to believe that because of the way IT slams this country in the way IT does, this troll IS an Islamist.
March 5th, 2007 at 6:42 pm
Give me a break, El Cid.
Four years into the occupation of Iraq, we try a “new” plan, claim it has “momentum” and it’s already a “success” and piss away the equivalent of Iraq’s annual GDP on it?
Why not just hang up the tattered “Mission Accomplished” banner again and call it good?
It would be just as believable and save us about $50 billion.
March 5th, 2007 at 6:44 pm
Gee, even though it isn’t the fucking thread…I fucked up. “this person has a tragedy in ITS life or to ITS life”.
March 5th, 2007 at 7:51 pm
Pretty nasty, El Cid.
Are we still pretending that anything we’re doing in Iraq is keeping America safer?
Somehow I think if Al Qeada or another one of our new Sunni allies get hold of a nuke, they aren’t gonna drive it across Iraq in the back of a truck.
March 5th, 2007 at 8:28 pm
I have to go with the Iraqi sheik who saw that American troops (and concurrent political meddling) in Japan and Germany for sixty years saw unprecedented peace and prosperity. I would add to that a Dad-like insistence on the benefits and responsiblities of capitalism, so as to avoid the marshmallowish fallback on socialist nonsense.
March 5th, 2007 at 11:53 pm
Once again the toad brings out the “Mission Accomplished” banner to show the world what an ignoramus he is.
Dear Toad:
I’ve seen that banner too many times to count. It’s brought out whenever a task force returns from a deployment. It was the end of the deployment that the banner celebrated, just as it has long been done in a venerated Navy tradition.
Saltydog
The twit seems to think, like many others who are wholly ignorant of the military in general, that it was some PR ploy to mean that the mission in Iraq had been accomplished. And not to put too fine a point on it, at the time, the first phase of the Iraq war had been accomplished with a speed and efficiency rarely experienced in the entire history of any military force–but that is not what that banner meant or celebrated. The banner only celebrated the task force’s part in it. But acknowledging that would get in the way of seeing everything as a complete and total failure on all fronts, now wouldn’t it. Its sort of like continually saying that our military was defeated in Viet Nam, when that is a falsity admitted even by the enemy we then faced.
March 5th, 2007 at 11:55 pm
Uh, I believe a bunch of blood thirsty civilians came up with a plan for a counter attack about 90 minutes after the attack was launched.
Flight 93.
Alphie’s idea is “no worse than Vietnam + Cambodia”. Two brutal dictatorships and no more than 2.5 million dead.
A rousing success. To this very day.
March 6th, 2007 at 2:16 am
Some things are beyond success.
When you embrace defeat, it will be yours for sure.
March 6th, 2007 at 7:30 am
alphie, fancy meeting you here.
I understand there’s a tactic in fencing in which you go straight in toward your opponent, turning your arm the whole time. If it works, you win; if it doesn’t work, you’re dead. (I’m speaking of when knowing swordplay mattered, of course.) Please note that I am *NOT* comparing the surge strategy to this tactic, with the potential “aha” moment of “So you mean if this doesn’t work, we’ve definitively lost?”; I’m commenting only on your “still pretending the US is safer” thing. Sometimes you have to take a temporary risk in order to improve the overall risk profile.
Or, when I came home from work when my oldest was just learning to walk and discovered him standing on the lip of our (never used) little Franklin stove, which in turn stood on a little brick dais - so that he was poised to clunk himself something awful on any number of hard and some sharp surfaces. I told him to stay where he was, rushed across the room, and “rescued” him; my then-stay-at-home husband came out of the next room saying, “What are you doing? I spent all day teaching him how to get up there safely.” My husband’s rationale was that since there was no way, besides shadowing the kid all day long, to gate off or restrict access to this little ziggurat we had in our living room, he’d be better off teaching our child how to approach it safely: temporary risk, long-term reduction of risk.
We’re in the temporary-risk phase in the Middle East, and because we’re not raising a toddler or in the middle of a fencing match, it takes longer than minutes or days. It’s been three short years of very largely victorious but still-ongoing strife in a region where writing was born. Patience.