"White House postponing loss of Iraq" -- Joe Biden

[unixronin]

Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said yesterday that he believes top officials in the Bush administration have privately concluded they have lost Iraq and are simply trying to postpone disaster so the next president will "be the guy landing helicopters inside the Green Zone, taking people off the roof," in a chaotic withdrawal reminiscent of Vietnam.

"I have reached the tentative conclusion that a significant portion of this administration, maybe even including the vice president, believes Iraq is lost," Biden said.  "They have no answer to deal with how badly they have screwed it up.  I am not being facetious now.  Therefore, the best thing to do is keep it from totally collapsing on your watch and hand it off to the next guy -- literally, not figuratively."

(Washington Post)

This comes on the heels of George Bush's announcement that he intends to send a further 20,000 US troops to Iraq.  (In this context, it should be noted that with units rotated out of Iraq leaving much of their equipment there to help supply new units coming in, it is highly questionable whether the US HAS another 20,000 combat-ready troops at this point.  I've heard it said that at this point there are no more combat-ready reserves left, period¹.)

If this is true, and the White House is sending additional troops to Iraq primarily to postpone a collapse that they see as inevitable and leave the next administration to deal with it, then it should surely be grounds for immediate impeachment.

On the other hand, consider who that would give us in the White House.

Still, it could be worse:  It could be Dianne Feinstein.

(Note:  This should not be taken in any way as denigrating Nancy Pelosi's becoming the first female Speaker of the House in the history of the US.  More power to her on that score, say I.  I just don't think much of the idea of having someone sitting in the Oval Office who not only supports the asinine and ill-conceived "War on Terror", but who voted in favor of allowing Federal, state and local authorities to confiscate legally-owned firearms during national emergencies that may be exactly when their owners most desperately need them.  Open letter to the liberals among our legislative bodies:  You may not LIKE the Second Amendment or the fact that, absurdly weak arguments to the contrary, it does indeed recognize and guarantee (not grant, just recognize and guarantee) an invididual right to keep and bear arms; but you swore an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution, so until and unless you can get the Second Amendment repealed, you're just going to have to suck it up and live with it.)

[1]  As lonewolf545 points out, the majority of those troops are going to be coming from existing overseas deployments such as Korea.

Comments

[lonewolf545.livejournal.com]

I can. I can also say "stupid". The Army doesn't want OR NEED a draft. All they have to do if they wanted to add 100,000 troops (if Congress gave them the money) would be to relax the enlistment standards to what they were in 1989, before all of the big defense cuts. The Army doesn't WANT to do that just because the current force is so effective BECAUSE it's so selective. Most people in the applicable age ranges are not in good enough physical condition or educated/intelligent enough to meet the current standards.

A simple way to increase the potential recruit pool would be to reinstitute 'fat boy' platoons, where a recruit who didn't meet the required height/weight/fitness standards would go through a weight loss and physical fitness program to get them ready to participate on an equal basis in Basic Training. Fixing the education system is outside the scope of military control, the same goes for reducing the number of kids on mind-altering substances, to include prescribed psychoactives.

The only people talking about a draft are the ones who opposed the war from the beginning and are using scare talk to build emotion against it.

[jilara.livejournal.com]

I've also heard serious discussion that it's time to rethink "don't ask, don't tell" and realize that sexual orientation has very little to do with the effectiveness of a soldier.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

About bloody time, if you want my opinion.

[lonewolf545.livejournal.com]

It'll eventually be changed, the culture of the troops currently in the Army is much less uptight about the issue than it was fifteen years ago. But it's still not, at least in the Infantry, overly gay-friendly. "Beats f***ing a dude" is an expression my brother has related as being popular with the troops where he is.