The war we should be fighting and winning, he said during his 30-minute rant, is for the hearts and minds of the locals, and CheneyBush policies are not capable of succeeding in that type of battle, especially given the use of torture as approved state policy, the not uncommon rapes and murders of Iraqi civilians by U.S. troops, the corruption everywhere that accompanies the U.S. occupation, the continuing lack of a functioning infrastructure (electricity, fresh water,) etc. .
Later in the evening, my sister and I engaged the military man again on a seeming contradiction: You stated, we say to him, that the U.S. can't win these type of wars against nationalist guerrillas but you think we should have thrown 500,000 troops into the battle anyway.
In an argument I've heard before from other military types, he didn't see his position as containing a contradiction:
>>"If we had moved that half-million in there in force and kicked ass immediately, stopped the looting, secured the ammo dumps, made it more difficult to come across the porous borders, installed our Iraqi strongman in charge -- if we had done all that then, chances are pretty good that things would have turned out much differently and to our advantage now.
>>"But since the Cheney Administration, mainly Cheney and Rumsfeld, messed up the situation royally from the git-go, there's no way we can put Humpty Dumpty back together again, achieve anything approximating a victory. It's simply time for us to go, before we make the situation even worse. Better to simply get out of there with as much of our tattered reputation as we can take with us, rather than flail about for a year or two before having to exit even more hastily in humiliating Vietnam-War fashion."
DEMOCRATIC MOVES ON THE IRAQ WAR
The latter part of that argument seems to animate many Democrats in the House and Senate, willing to take the political risk by attaching strict conditions to war-funding bills, as a way of crippling CheneyBush's ability to wage its aggressive war-of-choice and to build momentum for ending the U.S. misadventure in Iraq as soon as is practicable. Sure, the Dems' moves are a kind of attack-from-the-side approach, rather than opposing CheneyBush policies frontally, the result of which timidity is to leave U.S. troops on the ground there for several more years.
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