Fixing Iraq

Cenk Uygur has a gift of putting the situation in simple terms. In his lastest post he asks Can Anyone Define a Military Victory in Iraq? Simply put, if the problem is building an Iraq that can defend itself, "Who do we want our army to kill? What land do we want them to conquer? What military battle do we want them to win? No one in America can answer this question. And yet, we keep sending our men and women into the middle of this quagmire for this inherently non-military mission." There's a lot more there, read his post.

Now what I want to know is why can't the White House press corps ever ask either Tony Snow or President Bush such similar questions. Why can't they ask him to explain the difference between insurgent violence and a civil war? Why can't they ask "What are you doing to realize the political victories we need?" or "How do you expect the military to achieve the political compromises needed?" But I haven't heard them ask such questions. And of course there aren't any good answers.

So Rumsfeld isn't even out of his job yet and he's already back peddling. Now he's saying "I don't think I would have called it [Iraq] the war on terror". Brilliant. He freely admits he's used the term himself (and of course Think Progress has a list. But Rumsfeld does apparently have some things right:

"But the military, given the nature of this conflict, can't win alone. There is no way the military can prevail, because what we are engaged in, in a very real sense, is a battle of ideas (and) a struggle within the Muslim faith between the overwhelming majority of mainstream Muslims and a relatively small minority of violent extremists who have access to all the modern technology [and weapons]."

I think his problem is that he also believes the violence in Iraq is a few extremists, aka terrorists, instead of a fundamental difference between ethnic groups that hate each other.

Rumsfeld does understand that adding more troops can feed the insurgency and build Iraqi troop dependency on US troops. So there are reasons not to add more troops, it could make things worse. Maybe he's catching up to the rest of us afterall. Apparently Bush has largely decided his new Iraq policy and while he hasn't dropped any hints, rumors are that he'll do something stupid. My problem is that Bush could actually do something that is stupid, as opposed to Tom DeLay who now is just saying stupid stuff. "It's the fault of the liberals and the media and the Democrats, that from the very beginning have tried to undermine the will of the American people to fight this."