The sacrifices we make... or not

[pecunium]

Fred Kagan, the much touted "expert" claiming we can win the War on Terror, if only some 30,000 troops are added to the mix, for not less than months, is younger than I am.

He thinks this is the defining struggle of the age. It is at least as perilous to the state of things as WW2.

Is he enlisting? No. But he does hope other people will heed his call, that the President will make an impassioned plea for more people to enlist, and that such exhortations will lead to the needed troops enlisting.

For his part, he is more than willing to stay home (like Jonah Goldberg, who at least responded to people who asked him why he wasn't signing up) and make lots of money convincing people to send more troops to Bagdad and al Anbar.

It's all summed up at This Modern World

Comments

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

He may be a smart guy, but on this one, he's daft.

What are the troops supposed to do? Pacify Baghdad. How is that to be done?

Sadr has an army. Twice he's managed to hold us off, and managed to out politic us. The rhetoric seems to be that the troops are supposed to disarm him.

I don't see it happening. What I see happening if we try, is ugly.

I also see that this escalation seems to be planned around changing tour lengths, up the boots on the ground time to 18 months (and the present ones of 12 months keep getting stretched, so what are the odds of that happening to those who get the 18 month orders).

It's Rummy's plan of doing on the cheap, dusted off and given a coat of gilt.

TK

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

Man, I thought Mogadishu was in east Africa, not Mesopotamia. I blame my mother for teaching me geography--she's a liberal, after all. /snark

No, seriously. Didn't we try this, with fewer troops, on another continent, in the 1990s? And didn't it fail to work with a great deal of suckitude then? I really don't think we've become better at this since then, because it's not the kind of thing you get better at, really.

Does conservative mean "fails to learn from experience", or are these people just seriously committed to the Jiminy Cricket School of Warfare? (And which star are they wishing on, anyway?)

[wcg.livejournal.com]

I could tell you what the plan looked like when it was proposed as 50k. I have no idea what it looks like now. There's no damn way the 20k can manage the take/hold/rebuild process that was proposed.

You're right that trying to do it with 20k is doing it on the cheap. And just like the other times we've done things on the cheap there, it's going to fail, with a lot of good people dead to satisfy the conceit of GWB.