Told You So

"The very fundamental issue is, they don't know where the hell they're going" General Jack Sheehan.

What a mess. They don’t know where they are going, other than the destination is 20 January 2009, when they can pass off this clusterfuck to the next president and then commence with the rewrite of history to try to pin the fact that the U.S. lost Bush's Vanity War in Iraq on another president.

Less than five months after their “new way forward’ was announced and the surge surged forward, they are backpeddling again, and the positions that are being promoted are the ones those of us on the other side of the issue were promoting 40,000 troops ago.

From McClatchy:

The administration's latest Iraq strategy, which military and civilian officials in Baghdad and Washington are assembling and national security adviser Stephen Hadley is coordinating, stresses efforts to strengthen the Iraqi army and the central government and weaken sectarian forces, said three U.S. officials who have firsthand knowledge of the plan.

The officials, all of whom spoke only on the condition of anonymity because they aren't authorized to discuss Iraq policy publicly, said the evolving plan - which Army Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, and U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker are preparing - didn't envision any significant drawdown of U.S. forces in Iraq before 2008.

However, they said, "the search for a new direction," as one of the officials described the effort, was prompted by a recognition that the increase of American and Iraqi troops in Baghdad hasn't produced the improvements in security or the political progress that proponents of the buildup had expected and that domestic support for the administration's Iraq policy, even among Republicans, is ebbing quickly.

The administration's new Iraq war "czar," Army Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, remains skeptical that the surge can succeed, and instead has favored the kinds of political steps that Petraeus and Crocker have advocated, one of the officials said.

There's little optimism in Baghdad or Washington, however, that a new effort to strengthen the Iraqi army, bolster the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and weaken Sunni Muslim insurgents and Shiite Muslim militias is likely to succeed.

Personally, I find it thoroughly insulting that they are willing to give our ideas credence now, after they have engaged in a massive troop buildup, violence has ratcheted upward, and the Friedman Unit drawing to a close one week hence is the deadliest since the invasion of 2003 was launched.

You will just have to pardon me if I am less than gracious about it all. (Or don’t. I mean, I could possibly manage to care less what other people think of my positions on things if I really applied myself, but probably not. I know how I arrived where I am, and how many different cultures and time zones I lived in to get here.)

If ever there was a time I feel justified in assuming the mantle of the Jewish Mother saying “Well, I told you so. But do you ever listen to me? No.” it’s now. Fucking stone-deaf idiots.

Tell your Congressman to grow a pair, check this fool and send him the same God-damned bill over and over and hang the failures around his scrawny neck.

What part of November 7 do these morons – Democrat and Republican alike – not understand? We want direction, we want leadership and we want that leadership to show us the way out. The president is incompetent, incapable and increasingly inconsistent, and doing the exact opposite of what an intelligent, sentient, non-drug-addled, thinking human being would do. (But then, aWol is none of those things, so....)

Democrats guilty of capitulating to this increasingly inept and inane naked emperor need to face the wrath of the electorate – When we spoke six months ago, it was not to demand more of the same. And it sure as fuck wasn’t to be ignored and berated while the death ramped up, only to be considered as having relevant positions after the permanent escalation was made reality.