Pentagon insiders say members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff have long opposed the increase in troops and are only grudgingly going along with the plan because they have been promised that the military escalation will be matched by renewed political and economic efforts in Iraq. Gen. John P. Abizaid, the outgoing head of Central Command, said less than two months ago that adding U.S. troops was not the answer for Iraq.For thirty some years, the Republicans - including Bush until recently - have been telling everyone who will listen that the US lost Vietnam because Washington took over the war and made a mess of it. As we live in a democracy and not a Pinochet-style military dictatorship, I've never liked that argument and found it to be a cheap excuse for the US failures in Southeast Asia. So now that we are three and a half years into the Iraq fiasco, where Bush has told the public over and over that the military will decide, now he is telling us that he will override their decisions. Bush has been forcing policy on them for some time but to date has made every effort to avoid it looking that way.
So now that he is officially ramming change down there throats and with a Congress and public who has no faith in his ability to lead, why should anyone give him the freedom to make an even bigger mess? The reverse-Midas touch president has struck out too often and created too many problems, so why should we let him screw up again? If this was "three strikes and you're out" he would be back in the locker room, if not on the bus, gone long ago.
...from the beginning, the Joint Chiefs resisted. They had doubts that Maliki would really confront the militias controlled by fellow Shiites, notably Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army. Sadr held 30 seats in Maliki's parliamentary bloc and five ministries in his cabinet.
The Joint Chiefs were also worried that sending more troops would set up the U.S. military for an even bigger failure -- with no backup options. They were concerned that the Iraqis would not deliver the troops to handle their own security efforts, as had happened in the past. They were particularly alarmed about the prospect of U.S. troops fighting in a political vacuum if the administration did not complement the military plan with political and economic changes, according to people familiar with their views.
Pentagon officials cautioned that a modest troop increase could lead to more attacks by al-Qaeda, provide more targets for Sunni insurgents and fuel the jihadist appeal for more foreign fighters to flock to Iraq to attack U.S. troops.
Even the announcement of a time frame and mission -- such as for six to eight months to secure volatile Baghdad -- would play to armed factions by allowing them to game out the new U.S. strategy, the chiefs warned the White House.
