Dana Milbank of the Washington Post is one of the best political reporters on the White House right now. Unlike most of his colleagues, he's not afraid to point out nonsense, even though it's with careful journalistic phrasing. He shares a byline on this piece:
While Bush argued that the latest violence ... was vindication of the administration's approach [!!!], Pentagon officials conferred about how to prevent such attacks from foiling its plan to transfer power to Iraqi police and security forces.
Iraq War fans outside the Administration are also offering their ideas. This article in the conservative Weekly Standard, co-authored by people from the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) - both influential conservative groups associated with a hawkish stand on Iraq - actually has some good observations about the current dilemma and the need for a shift to a counterinsurgency approach.
But they don't seem ready to give up wishful thinking yet, saying of their approach (my emphasis):
Rather than reducing the U.S. presence, it might require putting an even greater American face on the war in those places. That could mean that, in the short term, the Pentagon might have to put on hold its plans to reduce the number of troops in Iraq to lessen the burden on the Army. The Marine Corps also might need to send fresh units back into Iraq.
Ironically, they cite Andrew Krepinevich's book The Army and Vietnam approvingly as "part of the counterinsurgency canon." But compare their article to the one by Krepinevich that I discussed in earlier posts to the excerpt I just quoted from their article. His approach is not so Pollyanish in tone as theirs about the force commitment that would likely be required.
Military analysts say that to match the soldiers-to-population ration that NATO had in Kosovo would require about 600,000 troops, or four times what the "coalition" has there now.
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