I just posted this comment to my friend Shannon's blog, and thought I'd surface it here to see what people thought:
Re: Sending more troops to Iraq
Honestly, our only way out of this mess without turning the region into a petri dish for apocalyptic designs is to send not 22,000 more troops in there, but 220,000 more troops in there for the next five years, and dedicate half of them to engineering/infrastructure tasks that will actually make a palpable difference in Iraqis' lives.
Re: Sending more troops to Iraq
Honestly, our only way out of this mess without turning the region into a petri dish for apocalyptic designs is to send not 22,000 more troops in there, but 220,000 more troops in there for the next five years, and dedicate half of them to engineering/infrastructure tasks that will actually make a palpable difference in Iraqis' lives.
Labels: Politics
posted by isaacjosephson at 7:28 PM
3 Comments:
There was a time -- very recently -- when I would have heartily agreed with you on this. I'm no longer even remotely sure. The problem, as far as I can tell (and I'm no expert) is that sending more troops to Iraq 3 or 4 or 5 years ago would have been effective; I'm coming to believe that sending them now will be futile. [Let's not even begin to think about the leadership these increased troops would receive once there.]
This is not to say that I favor a withrdrawl (immediate or otherwise); I don't. It's just that I no longer think that more troops is necessarily the answer. It is to say that there is no answer, which is, of course, the problem.
Good thing I'm not the one making the policy, isn't it?
Las Vegas is the only place Americans have come up with, when left to make a home for people in the middle of a desert (And think of who we were dealing with when we built that place). Regardless of whether we have 200,000 or 2,000,000 soldiers over there, for 5 years or forever, my intuition is that in addition to a forever-present dependency on their oil, a budding vacation destination is what our 'American Presence' over there will resemble in the next 30 years.
You know, I keep coming back to this idea and I become more doubtful each time I do.
I really don't think we could be "successful" with even 500,000 troops without a major paradigm change in our own administration and society at large. It was true when it was said that we must win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people in order to be successful at helping to create a prosperous atmosphere in Iraq. The greed that permeates everything we do will never be successful at fixing such a monstrous mistake as the one we made no matter how many troops are put in over there.
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