Now that most people are willing to see Iraq as a failure and Rumsfeld is gone, maybe some columnists will follow? Sadly John Podhoretz is still living in denial, but at least he is funny. Funny like a granny on ice.
You don't believe me? Ok, try this:
THE most common cliché about the war in Iraq is now this: We didn't have a plan, and now everything is in chaos; we didn't have a plan, and now we can't win.
This is entirely wrong.
NYPost
After the flip he will tell us why we are all wrong (or at least the lefties)
Podhoretz is becoming my favorite nut, i like him!
His column is here.
So, why haven't you been able to win in Iraq?
We did have a plan - the problem is that the plan didn't work. And of course we can win - we just have to choose to do so.
Yes, you need to really, really wish you can win, believe in your dream! Sadly this is the real world, not soccer practice for 6 year old kids..
And that plan was so great, that's why this happened:
Several hundred tonnes of sophisticated high explosive have been stolen from a Saddam-era military facility in Iraq, despite repeated warnings from UN weapons watchdogs that US troops should secure the site.
Timesonline
Hundreds of tonnes? Idiot.
And how about this:
A briefing paper prepared for British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his top advisers eight months before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq concluded that the U.S. military was not preparing adequately for what the British memo predicted would be a "protracted and costly" postwar occupation of that country.
WaPo
I think Mr. Podhoretz is not in touch with reality.
Just like all cowards, Podhoretz wants more blood:
Yes, we'd stay in Iraq and fight the bad guys when we had to, which seemed mostly to be when they decided to attack us first. Our resolve was intended to give the Iraqi people the sense that they were being given control of their future, and to give Iraqi politicians the sense that they had a chance to forge a new kind of country in which everybody could prosper.
For this reason, we relented on several occasions when we had a chance to score a major victory over the bad guys. Because politics was more important than military victory, because playing the game was more important than killing the enemy, we chose to lose.
First, always use big words like "resolve" because that really makes your case, also "bad guys" works well when you are telling stories to kids. Podhoretz is, of course, using such pearls as "Saddamist remnants", "foreign terrorists" and "anti-American Shiites". I really like the last one, i do not know what that means but it must be dangerous. Btw, they live there, your boys are the outsiders. Hundreds of thousands of people have died because of the invasion. That would make me hate you. Killing Al Sadr is one of his fantasies, also completely destroying Fallujah ( ok, he din't use those words) is on his list.
A good neocon lapdog must use the words his master uses:
So that was the plan. We didn't have to win against our foes: The Iraqi people were going to defeat them.
In other words, we were standing the Iraqis up so we could stand down.
Uh, my head hurts!
Clearly he is running out of coffee, that is the only thing that can explain this at the end of his column:
Kill as many bad guys as we can, with as many troops as we can muster.
If this is unrealistic, then Iraq is lost.
If we can't win, then we lose.
"bad guys".
He could have explained where you are going to get those troops and are you just going to kill people here, there and everywhere? And the last one, "If i can't see the light, then i'm blind, makes me wonder..do they pay him?
The clock is ticking. He has only a week, maybe two, to change course dramatically. To choose to win, and to direct the military to do so.
Or we are sunk, and so is he.
Oh, couple of weeks :D Tell me what must change? You need to kill more? Hundreds of thousands of people have died, sadly the neocons have not.
So ,there was no proper plan for post-Saddam Iraq, only strange dreams. In the real world we see this:
Top Marine: No Plan For Post-Saddam Iraq
Post-war planning non-existent
But no biggie, no one could have anticipated that having no real plans for post invasion Iraq could create some problems. The Middle east is so peaceful that it is the safest place to play stupid.
I love these guys, i really do.