No Retreat, Baby
David Weigel | August 20, 2007, 3:42pm
Jim Geraghty reports that the Bush administration is going to win back your support for the Iraq War with a surge of subtlely:
John McCain says he has been told General Petraeus will be testifying before the Senate on September 11.
McCain also plans a themed campaign tour to build up support for the war.
We’re going to get together a lot of our veterans, medal of honor winners, those who have served in Iraq, and we’re going to launch the “No Surrender Tour.” We’re going to try to build up support for this strategy, the anti-war people have been very active, so we’re going to try to organize not just for men and women serving, but the strategy.
If the O'Hanlon/Pollack column taught us anything it's that parades of soldiers or senators mouthing support for the war doesn't matter anymore, and that reports--however pre-determined--on the political situation in Iraq are all that matters. And even then their impact is limited. People make fun of Thomas Friedman or Bill O'Reilly for saying multiple times that we only had "a few months" or "six months" to turn the war around, revising their deadlines as soon as, well, the situation was obviously not getting better. They sound silly now, but they were on to something. In retrospect there was about an eighteen-month period, from early 2004 to late 2005, when Americans were losing confidence in the war but willing to give Bush and Rumsfeld a chance to fix it. The good will's completely gone now and only marginally reacts to bursts of good news from Iraq.
As to the politics of McCainapalooza, I like
Ryan Sager's response:I don't get this strategy for a simple reason: While the base certainly still supports the war, it's not as if Mr. McCain's opponents don't. He's not going to out-hawk Rudy Giuliani or Fred Thompson; he can run even with them on hawkishness, but that's not going to revive a corpse of a campaign.
Also, wasn't "No Surrender" the theme song of the Kerry '04 campaign?
UPDATE: Wise commenters, take note that Congress only mandated that Petraeus report before September 15. The September 11 date was chosen by the White House to meet that deadline with a little time to spare, and for no other reason whatsoever.
UPDATE II: OK, I'm unclear on who makes the final decision here--I don't know if it's the executive branch or Congressional Democrats. So some of my snark is probably unwarranted.
Douglas Gray | August 21, 2007, 12:49am | #
Here's some testimony from a few vets on the ground:
"This unit sets up this traffic control point and this 18 year old kid is on top of an armored Humvee with a .50 caliber machine gun," remembered Geoffrey Millard who served in Tikrit with the 42nd Infantry Division. "And this car speeds at him pretty quick and he makes a split second decision that that's a suicide bomber, and he presses the butterfly trigger and puts 200 rounds in less than a minute into this vehicle. It killed the mother, a father and two kids. The boy was aged four and the daughter was aged three."
"And they briefed this to the general," Millard said, "and they briefed it gruesome. I mean, they had pictures. They briefed it to him. And this colonel turns around to this full division staff and says, 'if these fucking Hadjis learned to drive, this shit wouldn't happen.'"
Camilo Mejia, who eventually applied while still on active duty to become a conscientious objector, said the ugly side of American racism and chauvinism appeared the moment his unit arrived in the Middle East. Fellow soldiers instantly ridiculed Arab-style toilets because they would be "shitting like dogs." The troops around him treated Iraqis, whose language they did not speak and whose culture was alien, little better than animals. The word "Hadji" swiftly became a slur to refer to Iraqis, in much the same way "gook" was used to debase the Vietnamese or "rag head" is used to belittle those in Afghanistan.
Soon those around him ridiculed "Hadji food," "Hadji homes," and "Hadji music." Bewildered prisoners, who were rounded up in useless and indiscriminate raids, were stripped naked, and left to stand terrified and bewildered for hours in the baking sun. They were subjected to a steady torrent of verbal and physical abuse. "I experienced horrible confusion," Mejia remembers, "not knowing whether I was more afraid for the detainees or for what would happen to me if I did anything to help them."
Another returning vet relates. “A few nights ago, for example, we witnessed the death of one American soldier and the critical wounding of two others when a lethal armor-piercing explosive was detonated between an Iraqi Army checkpoint and a police one. Local Iraqis readily testified to American investigators that Iraqi police and Army officers escorted the triggermen and helped plant the bomb. These civilians highlighted their own predicament: had they informed the Americans of the bomb before the incident, the Iraqi Army, the police or the local Shiite militia would have killed their families.
As many grunts will tell you, this is a near-routine event. Reports that a majority of Iraqi Army commanders are now reliable partners can be considered only misleading rhetoric. The truth is that battalion commanders, even if well meaning, have little to no influence over the thousands of obstinate men under them, in an incoherent chain of command, who are really loyal only to their militias.”
Sorry, we need to take out a few three and four year olds so that maybe, hopefully, someday, somehow, but we don't know how, you'll have a democracy, whatever that is.
