Three years later, the penny has finally dropped.
Two weeks before U.S. midterm elections, American officials unveiled a timeline Tuesday for Iraq’s Shiite-led government to take specific steps to calm the world’s most dangerous capital and said more U.S. troops might be needed to quell the bloodshed.
U.S. officials previously said they were satisfied with troop levels and had expected to make significant reductions by year’s end. But a surge in sectarian killings, which welled up this past summer, forced them to reconsider.
I don’t think that’s the case at all. I think that the GOP’s plan for the 2006 elections was to paint Democrats as being soft on terror. Since the public has, in general, rejected that argument, and feels that the war is going badly, now the Bush administration and the generals running this fiasco have finally admitted what was painfully obvious two years ago: we need more boots on the ground.
And, just think. All it took to get the powers that be to recognize reality was the impending loss of political power. In other words, if the GOP was favored to retain control of Congress, we’d be “staying the course” and anyone who dared to suggest a change in strategy would be branded a “cut and run” type.
You know what? I don’t give a damn what party it is or who is in power. I just want to win the frigging war. And if we’re not prepared to do that, we should pull out of the country immediately and let it sink.