This is what I expected and feared. But how can they get away with it? Won't continued occupation come back to bite them at mid-term and even the next general election? This isn't like Korea, where the killing and dying mostly stopped after the armistice. As long as we are there the body bags and maimed and damaged will be coming home. Besides. What's magic about ten years? What reason does anyone have to think that in ten years things will better enough so that whatever is impelling them to stay in Iraq that long will be fixed?
--- Michael Pollak <mpollak at panix.com> wrote:
>
>
>
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174844/having_a_carnage_party
>
> posted October 02, 2007 4:33 pm
>
> Tomgram
>
> We Count, They Don't
>
> By Tom Engelhardt
>
> <snip>
>
> Counting to Five, to Ten, to Fifty
>
> Right now, leading Democrats, as well as
> Republicans, are focused on
> counting to both five and ten, which turn out to
> be the same thing.
> In a recent debate among the Democratic
> candidates for the
> presidency, for instance, the top three (by
> media and polling
> agreement), Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and
> John Edwards refused
> to commit to having all American troops out of
> Iraq by 2013, the end
> of a first term in office -- five years from
> now, and 10 years from
> the March 2003 launching of the invasion.
>
> Like much else of recent vintage, this 10-year
> count may have
> started with our surge commander in Iraq,
> General David Petraeus,
> who, for some time, has been telling just about
> anyone willing to
> listen that counter-insurgency operations in
> Iraq could take "up to
> a decade." ("In fact," he told Fox News in June,
> "typically, I think
> historically, counter-insurgency operations have
> gone at least nine
> or 10 years.") Now, it seems, his
> to-the-horizon-and-beyond Iraqi
> timetable has largely been subsumed into an
> inside-the-Beltway
> consensus that no one -- not in this
> administration or the next, not
> a new president or a new Congress -- will end
> our involvement in
> Iraq in the foreseeable future; that, in fact,
> we must stay in Iraq
> and that, the worse it gets, the more that
> becomes true -- if only
> to protect the Iraqis (and our interests in the
> Middle East) from
> even worse.
>
> Conservative New York Times columnist David
> Brooks put it this way
> on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer: "[The Democrats
> in Congress are]
> not going to cut off funding, and we've seen and
> we saw in the
> debate this week, there are going to be probably
> U.S. troops in Iraq
> there 10 years, regardless who's elected. So
> they're not going to
> win on this." Liberal warhawk George Packer in
> the New Yorker
> recently wrote a long article, "Planning for
> Defeat," laying out
> many of the reasons why Iraq remains a disaster
> area and discussing
> various methods of withdrawal before plunking
> for a policy summed up
> in the suggestion of an anonymous Bush
> administration official,
> "Declare defeat and stay in." Packer concluded:
> "Whenever this
> country decides that the bloody experience in
> Iraq requires the
> departure of American troops, complete
> disengagement will be neither
> desirable nor possible. We might want to be rid
> of Iraq, but Iraq
> won't let it happen."
>
> Retired Brigadier General Kevin Ryan,
> representing the military
> punditocracy, offered the following: "I don't
> see us getting out of
> Iraq for a decade." In fact, increasingly few in
> official Washington
> do. (An exception is presidential candidate Bill
> Richardson, who
> launched a web video this week from a total
> withdrawal position that
> began: "George Bush says the surge is working.
> Gen. Petraeus says it
> will take more time. Republican presidential
> candidates say stay as
> long as it takes. No surprises there. But, you
> might be surprised to
> learn that Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and
> John Edwards would all
> leave tens of thousands of troops in Iraq") Iraq
> is, of course,
> acknowledged to be the number-one issue in the
> upcoming presidential
> campaign; the ever growing unhappiness of
> Americans with our
> presence in that country is considered a fact of
> political life; and
> yet it's becoming ever harder to imagine just
> what the future Iraq
> debate among presidential candidates will
> actually be about, if
> everyone agrees that we have at least five years
> to go with no end
> in sight.
>
> And let's remember that behind the five and ten
> counts lurks a count
> to 50 and beyond; the number of years, that is,
> that American troops
> have been garrisoned in South Korea since the
> Korean War ended in
> stalemate in 1953. Visitors to the White House
> have long reported
> that President Bush was intrigued with the
> "Korea model." As David
> Sanger of the New York Times' wrote recently:
> "Many times over the
> past six months, he has told visitors to the
> White House that he
> needs to get to the Korea model -- a politically
> sustainable U.S.
> deployment to keep the lid on the Middle East."
> (Keep in mind,
> however, that, when the Bush administration
> rumbled into Baghdad on
> their tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles in
> April 2003, it was the
> Korea model they had in mind -- though they
> weren't calling it that
> at the time.)
>
> This is the model that Secretary of Defense
> Robert Gates also seems
> to have put his money on -- a drawn-down
> American force garrisoned
> in giant, semi-permanent bases in a "stabilized"
> Iraq for eons to
> come. The Congressional Budget Office has
> already crunched numbers
> on what such a model would likely cost.
>
> Behind all these counting exercises lies the
> belief that wherever we
> land and whatever we do, we are, in the end, the
> anointed bringers
> of something called "stability" and if we have
> to count to 50, 500,
> 50,000, or 500,000 and do it in the currency of
> corpses, sooner or
> later it will be so.
>
> <end of excerpt>
>
> Engelhardt goes on to talk about the return of the
> Vietnam style bodycount
> and its attendent politics after years of
> scrupulously not avoiding it:
>
>
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174844/having_a_carnage_party
>
> And the first part I snipped, about the tripartite
> resolution in the
> Senate, is also interesting.
>
> FWIW, FAIR points out the obvious fact that,
> although the Democrats and
> the media think this is the "centrist" position,
> it's actually way to the
> right of the American public, 5% of which want
> troops to stay for five
> more years:
>
> http://www.commondreams.org/news2007/1003-10.htm
>
> But perhaps it is the center if you weight the
> averages appropriately,
> with the ruling class on one side of the scale and
> the public on the
> other.
>
> Michael
> ___________________________________
>
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