Iraq War: The state of things

"I think we are winning.  Okay?  I think we're definitely winning.  I think we've been winning for some time." - Gen. Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on the Iraq War 04/26/05

"I just wonder if they will ever tell us the truth." - Harold Casey, Louisville, KY, October 2004.

Joseph Galloway of Knight-Ridder has been writing some good pieces on the Iraq War.  Knight-Ridder in general has distinguished itself in its reporting on the war.  Unlike much of the mainstream media.

Galloway recently looked at how Reality sends chills through halls of power Knight-Ridder 10/06/05:

The generals who run the war in Iraq - Central Command boss Gen. John Abizaid and ground commander Gen. George Casey - came to town last week and let slip the awful truth about our efforts to stand up an Iraqi army and security force.

Although the Americans have spent a small fortune training and equipping more than 200,000 Iraqi soldiers and militia and police, the generals concede that only one battalion of perhaps 700 troops is actually capable of operating against the home-grown insurgents and the foreign jihad terrorists.

After two years only one battalion can stand alone without American guidance, backup, direction and fire support. ...

The president is still "staying the course" as the people following him fall further and further behind. We have written before, and will again: Staying the course only makes sense if you are on the right course. Otherwise you are just walking deeper into the swamp and the quicksand waiting ahead.

He also warns that the Army is broken and in need of repair Knight-Ridder 10/12/05:

Now [Bush and Rummy have] they've broken the Army, and after this administration is history, it will take 12 or 15 or 20 years to repair the damage it's inflicted on an institution that our country desperately needs in a century as dangerous as this one.

Both political parties, though, have failed the American voter by offering up candidates for high office who, in simpler times, would barely have qualified for tar and feathers and rides out of town.

How can I say this about the Army when just a week ago, at the Association of the U.S. Army convention, Secretary of the Army Francis J. Harvey and a veritable galaxy of stars were declaring, under orders, that everything in the Army was just fine; better than good; never better.

I say this because we don't jump when Mr. Rumsfeld yells frog, and I look at the evidence that accumulates day by day. I hear this from other generals, active and retired: The U.S. Army is utterly broken and in need of immediate repair.

He cites recruitment problems, Army plans to outsource even more functions, reductions in training and declining qualifications for those recruited.

There is no one right way to staff the Army.  But the Army should be matched to the missions that it will realistically be expected to undertake.

James Caroll used a different kind of image, the labyrinth, to describe the US situation in Iraq: The Labyrinth of Iraq Boston Globe 10/10/05 (also at CommonDreams.org).

For ancient Athens, the maze was on the island of Crete, and the monster was the Minotaur. For America, the maze is in Iraq, and the monster is labeled ''insurgency." This is no myth, no metaphor, no dream. The war is America's prison. Our politics are paralyzed now because no one can imaginethe way out. Youthful GIs and Marines hustle from one dead end to another, from the false exit of Iraqi ''sovereignty" to the trap door of the constitutional vote to the trick mirror of Iraqi armed forces that can take over ''security." This string of exitless corridors leads our troops ever deeper into the maze, more at the mercy of the devouring monster than ever. ...

We were so afraid that some awful thing would come at us from outside our walls. It didn't have to. The walls defined us, walls that open only into other walls. No wonder the Democrats have nothing to say. No wonder the Republicans are reduced to whining about the indictments of their leaders. The president has given up pretending that he has a clue. Like a pink-eyed mouse in a laboratory, he makes his blind circuit through the maze of his own limited imagination. Unlike the president, the laboratory mouse knows better than to pretend its panicked running reflects the virtue of steadfastness. This is how the nation's leadership behaves when it sees no way out of the horror it has created.

This is the result so far of the neoconservatives grand dream of bringing democracy to the Arab world with bullets, bombs and torture.

"Wars are easy to get into, but hard as hell to get out of." - George McGovern and Jim McGovern 06/06/05