Bush the Military Leader

Just a few comments on this WaPo article highlighted by Bloglord Soto.

So Bush relied on his own judgment that the best answer was to try once again to snuff out the sectarian violence in Baghdad, even at the risk of putting U.S. soldiers into a crossfire between Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias....

It was a signature moment for a president who seems uninfluenced by the electorate on Iraq and headed for a showdown with the new Democratic Congress....

"The guy who is most committed to winning and finding a way to win is the president. He always has been; he's the only reason we are still in this fight," said Frederick W. Kagan, a military historian [at the AEI]

What judgement he's relying on I simply do not know. Smug, unexperienced Fred Kagan? A "Historian" has no business giving military advice, especially Frederick W. Kagan, who holds a B.A. in Soviet and East European studies and a Ph.D. in Russian and Soviet military history from Yale University. But remember, Bush is the only reason "we're" (lucky us) STILL in this fight.

But it gets better, really, it does.

By early fall, even as Bush was on the campaign trail accusing Democrats of defeatism, he and his senior advisers were coming to the conclusion that his core assumptions were wrong. The political process would not lead to security in Iraq. In fact, it would have to be the other way around....

"It was pretty clear when you started to look at our assumptions, many of them just weren't right,"

Three years and how many dead later, 3 years and no discernable signs of a functioning government, certainly not a functioning democracy we supposedly were in this for, and now they figure their core assumptions were wrong? And to think that security, putting a lid on the Iraqi sectarian pressure cooker, would lead to that political assumption simply denies the reality of thousands of years of human history. Security imposed from within or without generally leads to discontent and violence, not peace and democracy, and it's criminal to think otherwise.

And this last quote, well, that last reason they give for why things didn't work quite the way they claimed they wanted them too, (and I'm of the mind that many simply weren't, and aren't, concerned over Iraq in any policy or theoretical or humanistic sense, but as a massive income redistribution system) simply reveals them as utterly lacking in any sense of governance or diplomacy or competence.

The Bush team concluded that the previous Baghdad security plans had failed for four reasons: The Iraqis never took ownership over security, Maliki placed political constraints on military operations, there were not enough reliable Iraqi and U.S. forces, and there was no serious effort to rebuild areas taken back from insurgents or militias.

So, what, they think that the troops would take over a city, say Fallujah, do nothing, then leave, and that was an accomplishment? This only betrays their utter lack of any military ability, any sense, any shreds of competence. In the old days they would loot and rape and put the city to the torch, which was a plan of sorts, Bush's adventure didn't even have that aspect of a plan.

Koresh on a Titan II missile, wars do not really solve problems, they create the environment for political and policy solutions to problems. To have no plan after the fight, as we've seen from the outset of this nightmare, plainly, emphatically, tells us that the people running the show need to be replaced. And from this article it's clear who that person is, George W Bush.