It's always entertaining to watch neocon rats deserting their Good Ship Iraq. Sad, yes....pitiful, certainly...but...
Well, just see for yourself what NY Post wingnut columnist Ralph Peters is saying today about that war where it used to be that "failure is not an option"
First, he makes it clear: those folks who have been saying Iraq is in civil war were wrong, wrong, wrong-
When I visited Baghdad in March, there was no civil war. There is no civil war in Iraq today. But it's beginning to look as if there might be one tomorrow.
Oh. Okay. Thanks for straightening us out, Ralph.
For three years, the violence was about political power...Now it's different. The unwillingness of the Iraqi government to take on the sectarian death squads slaughtering civilians is polarizing Iraq
But it's not a civil war, got that? Just "sectarian death squads slaughtering civilians". See, it's not a civil war until Ralph and his buddies say so.
Instead of working aggressively toward a solution, key elements within the Iraqi government have become part of the problem. Responsible for the police and public order, the Interior Ministry has failed utterly.
Translation: It's not our fault. And BTW, we're still waiting for those sweets and flowers we were due.
This is bad news for our troops in Iraq.
Gee, ya think? Any other insights, Sherlock?
For the first time, we may face a problem we have no hope of fixing. We can defeat the terrorists. We can defeat a political insurgency. But when our forces find themselves caught between two religious factions, the only hope is to pick a side and stick to it, despite the atrocities it inevitably will commit.
Translation: Us wingnuts were still right about Iraq. See, we could have won, and would have won, and showed all those libruls that doubted democracy could be bombed into people. But geez, noone could have forseen this Sunni-Shiite thing. The only logical solution is to kill all the Sunnis. Or Shias. Doesn't matter which-just pick one.
We helped make this mess. Instead of relentlessly destroying terrorists and insurgents, we tried to wage war gently to please the media. We always let the bad guys off the ropes - and apologized when they showed the press their rope burns.
Yup, absolutely. The whole problem is that we've been too nice. We should have bombed them, leveled their cities, dropped white phosphorus all over em, swept em all up and tossed them in hellish prisons and tortured them.
Oh, wait. We did that.
Well, no more Mr. Nice Guy from now on.
Now the only way to avoid an outright civil war is for our troops and the Iraqi army to break the sectarian militias in a head-on fight.
Oh, good. More war. Um, except that the Iraqi Army is, for all intents and purposes, a sectarian militia. Which we made that way.
The alternative would be to let Iraq fail. And we need to ponder that possibility honestly. While it's far too early to give up, we need to "think the unthinkable." We can force the Iraqis to do many things, but we can't force them to succeed.
Translation: It's not our fault. Our noble crusade for Iraq was stabbed in the back...by the Iraqis. Screw em.
Wait, did I say "noble"?
We can't keep the training wheels on the bicycle forever. If they won't unite to fight for their own country, we'll have to accept that our noble effort failed.
Yup, "noble".
We should never publicize a timetable for a troop withdrawal, but here's what President Bush should have told Iraq's prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, yesterday: "You are failing your country. We'll give you six months."
No, no timetable, like those cut-and-run pinkos like Murtha want. A deadline, sure, but not a timetable.
Oh, and one final little cherry to top off a wingnut column explaining why, although this administration and the neocons were right about everything, it's time we declared victory and got out:
Ralph Peters' new book is "Never Quit the Fight.""
